This week we’re still talking about video. They say a picture can say one thousand words. Video is thousands of images that tells us more than what the audio alone says. Most video on the web these days is between 24 and 30 frames per second. That potentially would put a one minute video at roughly 1.8 million words. Even if 30 frames equal one picture, you are still responsible for up to 60,000 words. How do we do this?
What is an Audio Description?
Sighted users can see the whole image in the video. While not everything on the screen is important, what is needs to be announced ass well. This is where an audio description fits in. It describes the action happening, any key background content, or something relevant that can’t be picked up by auditory cues.
Audio description takes planning. Editors often try to get the audio description to fit in the gaps of the dialogue. This isn’t always possible. To plan for it, identify the important visuals for understanding the content.
Take 25 seconds and watch the above trailer. You literally can stop at 25 seconds. You see, this trailer has some very important and dramatic scenes in the first 25 seconds. We see Indy use his whip, swap a bag of sand for a gold statue, and then the giant boulder come rushing at our hero. Other than some ambient cave noise and a yelp from Indy there is no clue what is happening visually.
While the scene plays back hear a narrator saying, “A whip wraps around a pole. A gold statue is on a pedestal. A man quickly swaps it for a bag of sand and sighs in relief. The man wipes away some cobwebs and hears a noise. He looks behind him to see a giant bolder rolling towards him.” That is the power of audio description (as presented in text…which reminds me, should I include the audio description in the transcript?)
How do we do it?
This going to be different by vendor. As such, we’ll start generic. In an ideal situation, the AD track should be capable of being turned on and off like we do captions. You give the URL as the source for the audio track as we set up a video element. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
But most players aren’t ideal.
In fact most players don’t have an AD option to them. For instance, YouTube has only one audio track that gets uploaded with the video. To provide an audio description, you need to create two versions, one with AD and one without. You would then upload them both and make sure to cross link them in the description.
Yes. This is a big freaking hassle. YouTube beta tested this in 2021 but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it (Email them!). Supporting your users with disabilities is important. It’s worth the time it takes to upload two videos.