Dr. John Slatin, Director of the University's Institute for Technology and Learning (ITAL) spoke about the importance of including captions with videos and guidelines for those captions. Here are notes from his talk:
The University has adopted the accessibility guidelines from Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act. Information about the University's compliance can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/web/guidelines/accessibility.html.
Dr. Slatin talked about 2 relevant standards. One is captioning that we are most familiar with for the deaf or hard of hearing. It isa text version of what is being said or what sounds are being uttered. It's a word for word and sound by sound description. It is non-judgemental and it is synchronized. The other is for when your "eyes are busy." This captioning is an auditory description of what's happening in the video. It, also, is non-judgemental and syncronized.
John distributed a handout that contained resources for captioning guidelines, tools, and online tutorials. He also included printed versions of a captioning and transcribing exercise.
WEB-SAVVY is a wonderful site on accessibility and usability resources and Macromedia has information on the accessibility of Flash. Bob Regan is Macromedia's accessibility guru.
John defined some terms for us. Sub-titles are in foreign language films. They are not verbatim. Captions render as much of the sound track as possible as close to verbatim as possible. Closed-captions can be turned off and on. It takes special hardware to have closed-captions. Open-captions are captions that are there as part of the video.
Three speech recognition applications are Dragon NaturallySpeaking, IBM's ViaVoice, and iSpeak.
John is teaching Accessibility Classses. This is really good for ALL web publishers to take. The next 2 classes are Friday, Feb 7 and Tuesday, Feb 25. You can sign up at the TXCLASS page. The course number is CC150.
John is also available for consulting on accessibility issues and has a lab with Jaws and other assistive technologies that we can have access to for testing. Contact him about this.
After Dr. Slatin spoke, Mark Rogers of the Instructional Design Group in the College of Communications demonstrated how he used a "green screen" in a promotional video he created for the College. Contact Mark if you'd like to do this yourself and have questions.