Online Video is one of the best ways to communicate complex issues with your stakeholders. However, it’s important to make sure that your video content meets WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.
At Bang the Table we’ve been encouraging our clients to use videos at every opportunity to talk about complex policy issues. Until now one of the barriers to entry for government organisations has been the need to create an easily accessible version of the video for the deaf audience. It seems a solution is upon us.
Early this month I had a long chat with Jo Booth from Ai Media about their very clever and VERY affordable solution. While we don’t ordinarily recommend specific services on this blog, Ai Media’s work is so outstanding that we couldn’t resist. So we asked Jo to guest blog for us.
I’ve abbreviated things for this post. You can download all of the information you could possibly want here.
Why improve communication options for people who are deaf?
Because deaf people can do anything, except hear. Without the ability to hear, how can we give deaf people access to the information they need to get a quality education and a head start in life? How can we give deaf employees access to the information they need to perform their jobs well? A report by Access Economics in 2006 found that our current systems are failing us – deaf children are 2.4 times less likely to complete high school than their hearing counterparts.
How ai media makes a difference
Ai-Media proactively supports the Federal Government’s recent initiative to focus on web accessibility. The Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 indicates that providing captioned (open and closed) videos and transcripts on websites meets these online requirements.
Many of our clients now are aware of the ability to integrate YouTube Channel as a part of their Social Media strategy, and often embed the YouTube video player on their external websites – so this is an area of growth for captioned content online globally. The accessibility features and publishing functionality offered by YouTube means that the addition of closed captions and transcripts is an easy implementation when clients work with Ai-Media. We simply create a professionally formatted Closed Caption file that is matched and timed to your video and you upload the file via YouTube’s upload manager.
We have the ability to deliver clients formatted Closed Caption files to marry to their online videos plus files that can be integrated within video editing projects. We can also provide high resolution Open captioned videos (subtitled) for upload to online media players that may not offer captioning functionality or features.
View some of Ai-Media’s online videos at: http://www.youtube.com/user/AiMedia01
We also create matched transcripts to accompany these captioned videos, so that sight-impaired visitors to a website are able to access the content of the video as well. This text alternative can be used with screen readers and other accessibility technologies.
Great post Crispin. Accessibility is so important. When I first started creating online content in 2006, I was frustrated by the idea of making everything accessible, but I’m now a total convert. I didn’t realise that sight impaired people had really embraced the audio podcasts for CSIRO that I created…and boy were they unhappy when I went on holiday! I would say that technology like AI Live seems to make accessibility much easier and cheaper than it used to be. Let’s face it, it’s hard enough to get some of these projects up without adding extra costs and difficulty. However, I believe we have a responsibility to use the technology available to us and make our information available to anyone with an internet connection…and it seems like the Government agrees.