Best Practices
6 Multimedia
In this section, we provide recommendations to guide your inclusion of accessible multimedia content.
What are multimedia?
The term multimedia refers to a variety of ways, or media, used to communicate information, such as videos, audio, animations, and slideshows. Multimedia can increase student engagement by providing course content ways that are essential, preferred, or simply a break from the norm of text. Providing accessible multimedia, then, is UDL at its finest.
What types of multimedia are you including?
Before you can determine what you need to do to make media accessible, you must understand what is required for different types of multimedia. Consider the following questions:
- Does your multimedia resource include audio narration or instructions? If so, you should:
- provide a complete transcript of all speech content and relevant non-speech content in the resource
- Does your multimedia resource include audio that is synchronized with a video presentation? If so, you should:
- provide captions of all speech content and relevant non-speech content in the resource
- Does your multimedia resource include contextual visuals (e.g., charts, graphs) that are not addressed in the spoken content? If so, you should:
- provide audio descriptions of relevant visual materials in the resource
Who are you doing this for?
Who benefits?
Providing transcripts, captions, and audio descriptions of audio and visual materials is essential for blind, low-vision, deaf, or hard-of-hearing students.
In addition, these practices also benefit (among others) students who:
- Are learning English as an additional language
- Study in noisy environments
- Are new to course or unit terminology
- Have a form of cognitive disability
- Prefer to see language rather than just hear it
- Need to locate information or a quote quickly
- Work in public or shared spaces without access to headphones
What do you need to do?
Many types of multimedia present information in a non-text manner. For students unable to use the original version of these formats, providing text as a transcript, caption, or written description gives them access.
Transcripts
Consider what your students would get out of your multimedia resource if they were not able to hear the audio portion, or if they had difficulty understanding the spoken word. A text transcript provides students with equivalent information to the audio content in a multimedia resource.[1]
As you work on developing a text transcript, keep in mind the following recommendations about what to include:
- Speaker’s name
- All speech content. If there is speech that is not relevant, it is usually best to indicate that it has been excluded from the transcript, e.g., “[A & B chatted while slides were loading].”
- Relevant descriptions about the speech. Descriptions that convey emotions and mood are usually provided in brackets, e.g., “Don’t touch that! [shouted].”
- Descriptions of relevant non-speech audio. These ar