How to Make Digital Assets Accessible: Video

This is an overview of the elements that require special consideration when using video content. Please review one of the Additional Resources for detailed instructions on any of the following.

General Guidelines

• Caption (or subtitle) all spoken content and music with lyrics.
• Provide a transcript for spoken content and music with lyrics in the video. Include visual description of images or slides that provide content (i.e. not decorative).
• Provide an audio description of essential images displayed in the video.
• Edit out or post a warning at the beginning of the video if it contains flickers or blinks at any time.

Optimizing Video for Learning*

• Allow students to have direct access to the video so that they can control playback features such as replay, fast-forward, playback speed, and pausing.
• Choose or create videos that are relatively short in duration or are divided into chapters or sections.
• Choose videos that are available with captions or that can be captioned by a provider. Captions are not only useful for those with auditory challenges, but can be useful for many learners, including those learning a new language, those accessing the video in a noisy environment, or those who prefer to read along as they listen.
• The automatic captions now provided on sites such as YouTube are not sufficient to meet accessibility requirements. While the technology behind automatic captioning continues to improve, it is not yet accurate enough to stand on its own without some editing to ensure its accuracy and timing.
• To be fully accessible to the greatest range of uses, transcripts should also be provided along with captions. Transcripts provide a text-based version of the content including audio descriptions of visual information and audio content (e.g., laughter, music). Screen reader users often prefer transcripts over listening to the audio content as it is a much faster way to access all of the information presented in the video.
• Student-created video should also be accessible.

*Optimizing Video for Learning from UDL On Campus by CAST is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Butler Libraries subscribe to the following video databases that cover educational, documentary content as well as some independent/foreign feature films. In addition to Butler having licenses to use video content from these services which will mitigate copyright concerns, the vast majority of the clips are already captioned and/or transcribed. Your subject liaison librarian is willing to assist you with searching these and additional resources for content that meets your subject needs and has captioning included. Feel free to reach out to your liaison librarian.

Consult the Find Images & Media: Butler Streaming Video for additional information on the Library's subscription streaming services.

Example of an audio description for video content

For accommodation purposes, videos used in courses must contain high-quality captions. If you create videos yourself (i.e. video lectures), this is a fairly straightforward process that capitalizes on Butler’s Panopto content capture system. Please contact the Center for Academic Technology (CAT) at 317-940-8575 or by email at cat@butler.edu for more information on this process.

Third party owned videos (e.g. found on streaming databases, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) used in your courses must also contain high-quality captions. To assist you in this process, CAT and the Library have developed a sequence of steps to help you determine that the best captioned video content is sourced and being used for your course.

1. Search our Licensed Databases (Library):
   Contact your liaison librarian and provide them with a list of videos you intend to use for your course.  Your librarian will search for the same and/or similar video content in one of the existing Butler subscribed video databases (Kanopy, Films on Demand, and AVON-Academic Video Online). Most of these videos already contain captions and Butler has licenses to use these videos (unlike most videos found on YouTube, Vimeo and similar services). You are encouraged to search these databases, too.
2. Seek captioning support (CAT)
   If already-captioned video content is not successfully located in the Library subscription databases or via other resources, CAT may be able to caption the content or outsource caption creation to a service provider. Factors affecting this step include the following elements:
   1. licensing restrictions of the work;
   2. turnaround time required and;
   3. length of the video content.

If you already have written permission from the copyright owner, this last step will be greatly aided. For more information about requesting captioning for 3rd party videos, contact CAT at 317-940-8575 or by email at cat@butler.edu.  

General Resources

Captions

Audio Descriptions

Transcripts