Audio Descriptions for Videos

Laura: Welcome to Accessibility in 5, a series from UFIT, where we explore a quick tip on making your content more accessible in five minutes or less. I'm Laura, and today's topic is audio descriptions in videos.

While captioning provides access to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, or who need additional access to audio, audio descriptions provide access to videos for people who are blind or have low vision, or who need additional access to visuals. Audio descriptions provide an outloud explanation of what's happening on screen, they give context for visually impaired audience members by explaining things like who and what is visible, actions people are taking, and similar content timed to primarily fit in between natural pauses in the dialogue. This means somebody who cannot see the video can still understand what's happening, by listening to it.
For example, if I'm watching a funny TV show, but I can't see it, I would probably not understand some of the jokes if they relied on or referred to physical movements the characters were making, facial expressions, and other things happening on the screen. An audio description can solve this problem. 

All pre-recorded videos should have audio descriptions unless the original audio encompasses all the content of the video. Audio descriptions can be created by third-party vendors the same way captioning can, but it's likely that many of the videos you make for work are informational, which will make it easier for you to plan your content in a way that avoids the need for additional audio descriptions without compromising the accessibility. For example, in this video, there's not a lot happening on the screen, although there will be later. But right now, it's just me and so the words I'm saying are much more important. 

Now, let's say I'm an instructor recording a brief lecture that will be used in an online or a flipped class. Maybe I have slides that include some images and graphics and sometimes bullet points outlining what I'm going to say with text. To avoid the need for audio descriptions, I must make sure that all of the content on the slides makes its way out of my mouth. 

First, I want to make sure that none of the text on the slides goes unsaid in my lecture. If it's not important enough for me to say, then it shouldn't be important enough to be on my slides and vice versa. That covers the text, but when I get to an image, I should say something like here we have a picture of a dog begging for a treat, which makes it obvious that there is an image and what the important context is before I move on to explaining the content that sparked the need for that image in the first place. You can check out our earlier video on alternative text if you want tips for what makes a good image description. 

It may seem a little more daunting when I get to something like a graph or a chart. But with a little practice, I can include all of the necessary content in the audio. I can start with the type of graph and title, then define the axes before giving a brief summary of what it shows.

 I'll give you another example, but first, I'd like to emphasize that I made this graph just to describe it, and it is in no way representative of actual data.

Let's take a look at this bar graph about pet ownership in North America. The Y axis represents how many households in each country have certain types of pets measured in millions of households. The X-axis includes four types of pets, birds, cats, dogs, and other. Each category of pet has three bars representing Canada, the US, and Mexico. Dogs are the most popular pet ranging from about 65 million households in the US to just over 50 million in Mexico, and the United States leads North America in pet ownership. 

Since I've explained what the graph looks like, now I can continue with my lecture. Anybody listening who cannot see the screen will understand the rest of my explanation. People who can see the graph have had a little bit of time to understand it before we analyze it more deeply or talk about what it means. I may sprinkle additional bits of description into my analysis later. For example, I might give an exact number for how many households in Mexico own birds, if it's relevant, but I won't have to re-describe the graph as a whole, and I just have to make sure that I'm not leaning on additional details that are only on the slides. 

There's a lot more that I could say about audio descriptions, but I hope this provides a good starting point. If you aren't sure how to describe something, try practicing describing it to a colleague without showing them the visual and see if they understand what you mean. 

Thank you for watching Accessibility in 5. You can find this video, as well as previous ones, archived in the resources section of the CITT website at citt.ufl.edu. Tune in next month when we talk about academic rigor and accessibility.