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[music]
Hello I’m Penny Everett
and I work for VerseOne Technologies Ltd
as a Web Accessibility Consultant
This is a short talk about making videos
accessible to the deaf
You may have concentrated in the past
on ensuring that your website
is accessible to the blind
But it is estimated that there are nearly
9 million hearing impaired people in the UK
and no doubt you will have some
deaf visitors to your website
These visitors will need to be considered
if you have any videos
or links to videos with sound
on your website
Surprisingly it’s not always just speech
that needs to be explained
to the deaf user
Anything that the hearing user needs to hear
the deaf user needs to know about too
Let me give you an example
A Housing Association prepares a video
about anti-social behaviour
and a section of the video
shows a gang of motor cyclists
revving up their engines
This sound needs to be explained
to the deaf user
because it’s relevant
to the understanding of the video
Unless you have a friend, relative
or work associate who is deaf
it’s difficult to get into the shoes
of someone who has this impairment
and to fully understand
how frustrating it can be for them
if they don’t know what is being said in a video
But anyone who is involved
in uploading content to a website
has a duty to comply with the Equality Act
which was published in 2010
Doing your utmost
to avoid excluding impaired users
is a given
and this applies just as much to videos
as it does to any other content
Nowadays more and more organisations
are linking to videos
which they have uploaded to YouTube
For instance
just because they are not actually
on your web site
doesn’t exonerate you from still having
to comply with the Equality Act
Unfortunately if they are your videos
then you are responsible for them
and that means
ensuring that they comply
In simple terms
this means adding a transcript
of exactly what is said on the video
to your web page
as an absolute minimum
But if you are aiming
for Double-A compliance
with the latest Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines
then you will need to add synchronised sub-titles
or captions as they are also known
Unfortunately you cannot rely
on YouTube’s automatic captions
A carefully produced video
of the CEO’s welcoming speech
on the Home page
can become a huge source of amusement
seeing how YouTube’s speech recognition
software has translated his or her words
Recently YouTube has made it a lot easier
to add your own captions to your video
and there are two ways of doing this
Timed captions which is one method
but it can take quite a long time to do this
Whereas a much easier and quicker method
involves simply typing the spoken words
into a plain text file
such as Notepad for Windows
or Notes for Apple Macs
using a basic set of rules
and you can have a video
with synchronised sub-titles within seconds
As a rough guide
it will take about one-and-a-half hours
to create sub-titles for a 5 minute video
And as long as the words in the transcript
match the speech exactly
the uploaded text file will sync with the video
and the sub-titles will be displayed
at the same time that the words are being said
Once you have added your sub-titles
to your YouTube video
you will have a video
with what’s known as closed captions
which means that they can be
switched on or off
open or closed
Sub-titles will not only help
your deaf viewers
but also anyone in a noisy environment
or a work situation
If you do not intend to use
the YouTube platform
and prefer to upload a video
to your own website instead
you will need to add sub-titles
to the video itself
We can advise you
on composing the disclaimer
for your accessibility page
if you are not currently able to fully comply
with the requirements of the Equality Act
Although I have to say
that without an adequate reason
as to why the deaf user has been excluded
or a time scale saying
when the omission will be rectified
a Court of Law
would not be very sympathetic
This would apply particularly
to a large organisation
with obvious resources
both in terms of finance and personnel
If you would like help with adding
captions to your videos
or you would like a copy of our leaflet
on "How to make your videos accessible"
or any other advice about accessibility
then please do contact us at
info@verseone.com
Thank you