Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a
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11 – Accessibility <strong>and</strong> Universal Design<br />
<strong>and</strong> you need to ensure that all visitors to your site are<br />
able to get this in<strong>for</strong>mation.<br />
TRANSCRIPTS VS. CAPTIONS/SUBTITLES<br />
A transcript is one way that you can provide your audience<br />
with a second <strong>for</strong>mat <strong>for</strong> your content. Transcripts<br />
are easy, <strong>and</strong> can be created by anyone. If you are the<br />
creator of the video, chances are you have a script that<br />
you can provide. In some cases, a script may not need<br />
any modifications to be a full transcript. If you need to<br />
write a transcript <strong>from</strong> scratch, it isn’t hard, but it is<br />
time-consuming. Load up the video, <strong>and</strong> your word<br />
processor <strong>and</strong> get typing. Be<strong>for</strong>e long you will have a<br />
transcript to publish.<br />
A transcript usually consists of one file with the<br />
whole content of the video. On the other h<strong>and</strong>, captions<br />
<strong>and</strong> subtitles are synchronized with the video stream,<br />
<strong>and</strong> as such require more ef<strong>for</strong>t, <strong>and</strong> time to create.<br />
Tip<br />
You may want to consider using speech recognition<br />
software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The<br />
authors of this chapter have had very good results<br />
with NaturallySpeaking. One of the big advantages of<br />
using speech recognition is that it keeps your h<strong>and</strong>s<br />
free to do other things while transcribing, such as<br />
control the playback rate, <strong>and</strong> replay a section of the<br />
video). In some cases, you will find that transcription<br />
using speech recognition can actually be faster than<br />
manual input via the keyboard!<br />
CAPTIONING VS. SUBTITLING<br />
Subtitles are a textual representation of the speech in a<br />
video clip. The focus of subtitles is to state what is said,<br />
not what is audible. Subtitling does not attempt to provide<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mation about other aural cues, such as a ringing<br />
doorbell.<br />
Tip<br />
If you wish to show a clip, which has dialogue in<br />
another language, consider captioning in your<br />
audience’s primary language! By doing this, you<br />
can aid language comprehension, <strong>for</strong> students that<br />
underst<strong>and</strong> some of the primary language. For<br />
students that don’t speak the clip’s primary language,<br />
they will now be able to underst<strong>and</strong> what is<br />
said in the video.<br />
Captions attempt to provide a textual representation of<br />
all the audio in a video clip. This may include speech as<br />
well as sound effects (<strong>for</strong> example, a ringing doorbell)<br />
<strong>and</strong> background music. Writing video captions can<br />
come down to a matter of style. As with everything else<br />
in accessibility, you need to use common sense when<br />
making decisions about how much has to be captioned.<br />
Be thorough without overwhelming the user with unnecessary<br />
details.<br />
If you are looking to provide a base level of enhancement,<br />
start with a transcript of the video. For a more<br />
interactive approach, subtitling or captioning can greatly<br />
increase the video’s comprehensibility <strong>for</strong> people who<br />
struggle with the language spoken. Reading the text<br />
while hearing the dialogue can be very helpful when<br />
learning a language.<br />
Tip<br />
Open vs Closed Captioning: Closed captioning is a<br />
technology that an individual user enables, to see<br />
the captioning <strong>for</strong> a given video. Common applications<br />
of this are in: News broadcasting, <strong>and</strong> on<br />
VHS/DVD movies. With open captioning, the<br />
video’s picture has the textual representation directly<br />
ingrained into it. Users cannot choose<br />
whether they see the captions or not; they are always<br />
enabled. A common application of open<br />
captioning is <strong>for</strong> videos in another language.<br />
Captioning is something that you can do yourself, but<br />
due to the amount of time necessary it may be more<br />
practical to hire a professional captioning company to<br />
caption your video. This can be expensive, but in the<br />
end you may find the price worthwhile. Video alternatives<br />
should be considered part of the cost of building<br />
<strong>and</strong> maintaining your site.<br />
FLASH<br />
Tip<br />
Caution: Avoid building your entire website in<br />
Flash. Yes, you can make some visually impressive<br />
pages doing so. Yes, Flash sites can have a certain<br />
cool-factor, unachievable with HTML. It simply<br />
remains that most Flash sites are not as accessible<br />
as HTML sites.<br />
Like all other <strong>for</strong>ms of multimedia, Flash can improve<br />
accessibility <strong>for</strong> some users <strong>and</strong> degrade it <strong>for</strong> others. It<br />
can be easier to demonstrate concepts with interactivity<br />
<strong>Education</strong> <strong>for</strong> a <strong>Digital</strong> <strong>World</strong> 167
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