Accessibility Guide and Toolkit

It’s important to ensure that all instructional multimedia, such as videos, audio clips, and presentations are accessible. Specifically, auditory information needs to have a text alternative (e.g. captions or basic transcripts) and visual information needs to have either a text or audio alternative (e.g. descriptive transcripts or audio description).  

Accessible captions for video content are synchronized with corresponding audio and include:

• speaker attributions (if more than one speaker)
• spoken content
• Relevant speech descriptions (e.g. nervously, angrily)
• relevant nonspeech audio (e.g. laughter, music)

If you created a video, the first step for captioning your video is to accurately transcribe the audio. If you have a script, this can be used as the starting point of your transcript. 

To save time transcribing audio, you can have video editing software or a video hosting site, such as YouTube, generate automatic machine-generated closed captions that you then review and edit for accuracy. For an example of this shortcut, watch Eric Moore's Ninja Way to Speed up Accurate Captions on YouTube. 

For more help writing quality captions, visit the Described and Captioned Media Program's Caption It Yourself resources. Review the links below for more information on how to caption with several programs common to the college. Please note that Blackboard recordings do not have a captioning interface available. 

Sign Language Interpreters are available for class lectures and all other college events. To arrange sign language interpretation for your class or event, e-mail interpreter.signlanguage@norquest.ca or call 780-644-6084.

The transcript you created for captions is a basic transcript containing a description of the speech and non-speech audio.  For audio materials that cannot be captioned, provide the basic transcript alongside the audio file as a text alternative for being unable to hear or access the audio. 

For people who may not be able to see or access the visual content, you need to create a descriptive transcript. To create a descriptive transcript, take your basic transcript and add descriptions of all meaningful visual content presented in the multimedia.

Descriptive transcripts include:

• Speaker’s name
• Spoken content
• Relevant speech descriptions (e.g. nervously, angrily)
• Relevant non-speech audio (e.g. laughter, approaching footsteps)
• Description of images (e.g. a computer)
• Descriptions of location (e.g. a classroom)
• Descriptions of action (e.g. door opens)

Descriptive transcripts are especially likely to be accessed with a screen reader, please use Microsoft Word for transcripts and remember to use the accessibility checker before publishing.  Post your transcript in proximity to the multimedia it describes.

Learn more about creating useful transcripts.

Audio description refers to an additional narration track describing visual content within multimedia such as presentations, videos, and films.

If your class is doing a major film study, source an available copy with a descriptive audio track available, many major production studios and streaming services have optional descriptive audio tracks.  Listen to a major studio's example of audio description from WebAIM.

When you are creating audio and video, try to incorporate audio descriptions into your spoken content. For example, instead of referring to written text on a slide, read aloud the text you want your audience to know.  Instead of referring your audience to look at a figure, provide a spoken interpretation of what the figure is conveying. Learn more about planning your audio descriptions.

If you are sourcing audiovisual multimedia, evaluate whether it contains descriptive audio or has a descriptive transcript available before incorporating the media into your course.