Best Practices
7 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.
File types used: MP3, MP4, PPT
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?
This work supports students who:
- Are deaf or hard of hearing, like Steven
- Are blind or have low vision, like Jacob
- Have a form of cognitive disability
- Are in a location where they cannot play or hear audio
- Are not native-English speakers and need written-word formats to support understanding
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 are usually provided in brackets, e.g., “[metal pipes crashing to concrete floor].” Background noise that isn’t relevant can be left out.
- Headings and sub-headings. Headings help when they make a transcript more usable or easy to navigate, especially when the transcript is long. When included, put headings in brackets to show they were not part of the original audio, e.g., [Introduction]; [Group Discussion]; [Case Study].
Transcrip