094: Multimedia Accessibility on Your Website and Beyond, Independence Brewing Convict Hill Oatmeal Stout

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In this episode, we walk through captioning, transcription, and audio description requirements in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and offer practical tips and tricks for meeting these requirements. 

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Chris: Welcome

to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. And now onto the show.

Amber: Hello everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.

Chris: Hey everybody.

Amber: And Steve.

Steve: Hello everyone.

Amber: And we are going to be talking about multimedia accessibility. This is episode number 94 in the Accessibility Craft podcast and you can find show notes at AccessibilityCraft.com/094. We always start every episode with a beverage.

Today’s Beverage

Amber: What are we drinking today, Chris?

Chris: We will be tasting Convict Hill Oatmeal Stout by Independence Brewing. I realized it had been a while since we had a stout. It’s starting to get cold outside now, so it seemed like an appropriate time to break out something that is , uh, dense, and heavy, and sludgy, and gross, and…

Amber: No! I love stouts. They’re my favorite kind of beer.

Chris: But they they say that this is the, either the ultimate breakfast beer or the logical end to a perfect evening. So they’re really just capturing both ends. So either you’re starting your day off right or you’re ending it right according to them.

Amber: Do they really say that? (Cross-talk)

Chris: I got this straight off the website. They say it’s the ultimate breakfast beer. I mean…

Steve: If you’re starting your day with a beer, it’s not going to be a good day.

Amber: Did you ever have beerios in college?

Steve: Beerios.

Amber: I don’t actually know if anyone did that, but I remember the joke is that you would just have a bowl of Cheerios and if you didn’t have any milk in your fridge, it was okay because you could pour beer on it.

I’ve never done that.

Steve: No, I commuted to college and I was married.

Amber: You had milk in your fridge.

Steve: I had responsibility.

Chris: I think the last time I had a beer early in the morning was when we did the the recording with Anne Mieke. Probably over a year ago now or right about that. And I remember we had a Lambic at at like seven or eight AM or something.

Amber: Becase she’s in Germany.

Steve: Oh yeah.

Amber: Or yeah, Belgium. I don’t know. She’s somewhere over there. .

Chris: That wasn’t a great day for me in terms of productivity. ,

Amber: I don’t think I drank my whole thing. ’cause I was, eh, I only drink so much of this in the morning time. .

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: But I’m excited to have a stout. I like stouts and it is not the morning time, so yeah. That is good.

I’m going to open mine.

Chris: We didn’t really talk about the cans, so while Amber cracks that open, we got a nice, simple understated. It’s kind of like gold and silver on black.

Amber: I had to get a pint glass because I love the color of stouts and I wanted to see, look at the foam on the top of that.

So it’s got lots of foam, which I’m really excited about. It like started at about 75%, but I think it’s now like, I don’t know, 33. It kind of, you know what it looks like to me? A root beer float, right? With the foamy stuff on the top? It very nicely makes my Accessibility Craft Podcast logo on my pint glass readable.

Steve: Good color contrast on that head, right?

Amber: The drink itself is quite dark, like a very dark brown. And, oh, it smells so good to me. I’m excited about it.

Chris: I’m not getting a lot of nose, but I it’s because mine’s still in the can, but I’m going to koozie it up here. I’m going to take a sip.

Amber: Well, I mean, it smells kind of caramely. It’s not really like a chocolatey or coffee-y kind of stout.

Steve: Why is it, why does it say oatmeal on it?

Amber: I mean, that means it’s made with oatmeal. Like there’s, I’m pretty sure they include oats in the mash .

Steve: Really?

Amber: I think so. I don’t know.

Chris: It’s definitely a thick beer. It’s almost like, it’s like beyond whole milk. It’s approaching like half and half levels of thickness. Definitely some bitterness.

Amber: I do not think it’s that thick. You are giving people… You know, you know what the flavor profile of this is though? This is the weirdest thing. This is the first thing I think I’ve ever thought of when I tasted it. And I’m not sure if this is horrible or not. But when I tasted it and I was thinking about the notes It reminded me a little bit of the smell of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco.

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: That’s what this tastes like to me.

Chris: I was going to say something similar. To me, it kind of leads with, I’m getting like that espresso, like bitterness, a little chocolate, and then I’m getting like leather and tobacco and a long finish. Like it’s, it’s definitely got those earthy things going on. I still don’t like stouts but it’s…

Steve: It’s coffee. Yeah. I’m getting coffee.

Amber: It tastes kind of coffee flavor to you.

Steve: Yeah, but it’s kind of creamy too. Like there’s something creamy to it.

Chris: There’s a little bit of smokiness as well. I think it’s probably from the roasted barley, but…

Amber: Yeah I don’t get any of the chocolate flavor This is not a chocolate stout and I don’t get anything that tastes like, makes me think of chocolate. My first thought was it reminded me of that in like kind of a sort of comforting way. I don’t know because I think about my grandfather when I was little he’s passed away now. But like that was one of the things I always remember. Visiting him and he would smoke his pipe in the garage, because my grandma would not allow it in the house. He’d sit out there and do crosswords, and we’d go sit there next to him in folding chairs in the garage while he’d do crosswords and smoke his pipe.

Steve: My grandpa always had that sweet tobacco. You know, like the cherry tobacco.

Amber: Yep.

Steve: But it doesn’t taste like oatmeal though. No oatmeal.

Amber: No, I mean, I don’t think it’s a breakfast beer, but I also don’t actually think there is a such thing as a breakfast beer.

Chris: I think this would be pretty good with some vanilla ice cream though. Just pour a little bit of that over some vanilla ice cream.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: I like it. I’m probably going to drink the whole thing, which will make it real fun because this is a percent.

Chris: Yeah. It’s no slouch on the ABV front. I’m going to be taking mine slow.

Well, cool.

Amber: I had to empty the can into my pint glass.

Chris: Amber loves stouts for any new listeners who haven’t been listening for a long time. I mean, it’s been a long time since we did a stout. So I’m glad it’s a good one. I would categorize this as a good stout. And I say that as a non stout person. I really don’t like them.

Amber: I was so excited about it, I forgot to put up the caption, so I just did. Today’s beverage. Convict Hill Oatmeal Stout. So I give it a thumbs up.

Chris: Independent Brewing. Yeah, thumbs up from me. I would never go out of my way to get it, but if it was like, you know.

Amber: You think you’re going to enjoy it?

Chris: If it was between this and like Bud Light and Corona, I’d probably choose this. And that’s saying something for me because I really don’t like these. But it’s a stout I would actually choose over some other really basic beers.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: What do you think, Steve?

Steve: I’m not a huge Stout fan myself either, but this is pretty, this goes down pretty easy. And I did forget to refrigerate mine. So mine’s a little

Amber: He’s drinking it warm!

Steve: It’s a little, I’ve got some ice here that it’s sitting on top of, but like, it’s a little warm.

Amber: Do you have the ice in a glass? I bet it would be good if you just poured it, iced it.

Steve: Yeah, let’s do that.

Amber: Just pour it in. It’ll make it slightly less alcoholic as your ice melts, but you know.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. It does have a lot of head like Amber had.

Amber: Yeah. I like that. Like it, it gives it a kind of a fun experience.

Steve: Oh yeah. It’s much better. Much better in the glass with some ice.

Chris: There you go.

Steve: But yeah, I’d probably take the bud light over this.

Amber: Okay. So, thumbs down or just in the middle?

Steve: In the middle. Thumbs in the middle.

Review of WCAG Success Criteria for Multimedia

Amber: Well, let’s shift over to talking about some accessibility. And I was looking through. As I get ready to plan these episodes, I look back and I’m like, what have we not talked about yet very thoroughly? And I realized that we had not had a really decent conversation about multimedia accessibility for websites and beyond.

So social media, all of that kind of thing. What do I mean by multimedia? I mean, making your video and your audio. accessible. So I thought it would be good for us to talk about that because it comes up a lot in conversations. When we’re doing remediation plans with clients, we don’t edit their videos, but we frequently will tell them, hey, you’re missing captions or you don’t have transcripts, accessibility checker flags for these kinds of things.

We have to have conversations with them about making sure they don’t have rapid flashing or other kinds of accessibility issues in video. And so I thought it would be good for us to talk about what is required and then also maybe what we see in real life. I’m wondering if it makes sense for us to first just touch on those requirements and go through all of the different WCAG success criteria that are related to what multimedia, which in web content accessibility guidelines land is called time based media.

So video or audio that plays over a period of time, I guess is the idea for that.

Chris: Should we read the WCAG standards for this in a very, monotone, slow voice.

Amber: No, let’s not put anyone to sleep. We’re going to make this as exciting, as thrilling as possible. And since Steve has his awesome WCAG hat on, Steve, you get to go first.

Steve: All right. So, Success Criteria 1. 2. 1 Audio Only and Video Only Pre Recorded. So this is a Level A. For pre recorded audio only and pre recorded video only media, the following are true except when the audio and video is a media alternative for text and is clearly labeled as such. So just to tag onto that, a media alternative for text is when you just straight up read like a pre written blog post, correct?

Amber: And like, then you provided like a podcast or something that had no different content, only reading that blog post.

Steve: Yeah. So you, you are to for pre recorded audio only, you need to have an alternative for time based media, which a lot of times is a transcript, correct?

That represents equivalent information for the prerecorded audio. For video either an alternative for the time based media or an audio track is provided that represents equivalent information for the prerecorded video only content. So it sounds like you can provide an audio version as your alternative to the video, correct?

Amber: Yeah. To describe like some of the visual things.

Steve: Yep.

Chris: All right. I’m up next with success criteria in 1.2.2 or 1.2.2 Captions Prerecorded. And basically this is a level, a requirement that says captions need to be provided for all prerecorded audio and what they refer to as synchronized media.

So this is any sort of audio or video that is in sync with another format or presenting information with time based information. So I think we’re talking about like syncing of captioning, right, or sync or synced up in that sort of way. Except, and this is the exception, if the media is a media alternative for text and it’s clearly labeled as such.

So going back to what Steve was saying, it’s like, you’re literally reading the words of a blog post in a audio or video format, you don’t necessarily need to have captions because you’re verbatim presenting the same information in two different ways.

Amber: Yeah, I always like to flag on that one, though, that while that’s technically true on your website, if you were also uploading that video to YouTube, that full text wouldn’t be on YouTube, so you probably would want to have captions on the video anyway.

Like, it’s one of those things, like, technically on your website, it’s fine. But these, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines don’t just get enforced on website accessibility laws can be impact your YouTube account, your Vimeo account, Wistia, your Facebook, Twitter, any of that kind of stuff.

Chris: Yeah. Now, I don’t know if we’ve spoken about this before, but would it be sufficient to link to that text alternative for media in the video information in YouTube and or Vimeo? As long as that’s very clearly labeled and the hyperlinks going out. Or do you think that’s insufficient? Obviously, captions are more ideal. That’s not what I’m debating.

Amber: Yeah it might be fine. I’m not going to give any legal advice on this Accessibility Craft podcast episode. I’ve not drank enough of my beer yet to start handing out legal advice as a non lawyer.

Steve: You have to be through one stout to give legal advice. No.

Amber: I’m pretty good about not doing that.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Amber: No, I think. You know, the thing is there’s this line of what is technically sufficient for meeting the success criteria and what is actually best for users. And that’s one of those things where that might be technically fine if you put in the description, like, this video does not have captions because it is a media alternative to the text presented at this URL.

Like, because you’d have to label it as such, and so maybe that would technically be fine. And then maybe that would drive traffic to your website, I don’t know. But at the same time, like, you probably would lose out on people. Being able to watch the video on YouTube.

Chris: I don’t want to, I don’t want to click on something else to consume this content. Or I want to see the video synced with the text content and not separate text content.

Steve: Does the does the description field in YouTube allow for enough characters to add the full transcript there?

Amber: Oh, probably. I don’t know what the character limit is on that, because, but I mean, I feel like I have seen YouTubers who have put these really long descriptions with a lot of links.

Probably that they get affiliate deals off of. But yeah, I don’t know. So maybe you could, especially if it’s like a three or four minute video, that might not be that bad. But, captions are probably better.

So 1. 2. 3 would be the next one. This is also a Level A success criterion, which means everybody needs to do it. And it is Audio Description or Media Alternative for Pre Recorded. We’ve been talking about this pre recorded, but I don’t think we really said it. Basically it means anything that you recorded in advance that is not being live streamed in that exact moment. So anything you’re uploading to YouTube as a video, that’s pre recorded.

And basically what this says is that you have to provide an alternative or an audio description of the video content. So, same sort of thing. You need to either have a text, written text that just, that includes the spoken audio and a description of what’s happening that’s important in the video or any visuals from the video.

Or if not, you’d have an audio description file that someone could listen to that describes it, which we’ll talk a little bit more about later in this episode. So that is 1. 2. 3.

Steve: All right, so the next one is success criterion 1. 2. 4 Captions for Live. So captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media. So as we stated before, synchronized media is like, like a presentation that you’re giving that has, yeah, information along with a presenter. Okay.

Chris: And then success criterion 1. 2. 5 Audio Description for Pre Recorded, which is a Level AA requirement essentially says that we’re now needing to provide, if we want to meet this level audio description for any pre recorded video content that is in the category of synchronized media. So Amber already described what audio description is. We just need to kind of ship out that audio description with our pre recorded video.

Amber: And then 1. 2. 6, Sign Language for Pre Recorded Videos. This is a AAA success criterion. So most entities or organizations around the world only by law have to meet AA but this might be an opportunity to go above and beyond. And depending upon the audience you serve, it might be important to meet this success criterion. But this success criterion basically requires that you have sign language interpretation for any audio or video that you have. on your website or on your social media.

Steve: Cool. So success criterion 1. 2. 7 Extended Audio Descriptions. This is a AAA level where pauses in the foreground audio are sufficient to allow audio descriptions to convey this, the scene of the video. Extended audio descriptions is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media. So this is basically not just, you know, captions for what’s being said, they will actually stop at certain places and describe what’s on the screen, if I understand that correctly.

Amber: Yeah, there’s, maybe we can find a good example of this to throw in the show notes, because I’ve seen like some Google and some Apple commercials with audio description where they do that and basically they freeze the video and then they insert extra, like a narrator style description of the scene that’s important.

And then they restart the video because the natural pause in what was happening in sound in the video wasn’t long enough to actually have the important narration. So that’s what this is doing.

And then, am I next?

Chris: No, I’m next.

Amber: Chris is next.

Chris: So we’re going to, next is success criterion 1. 2. 8, 1. 2. 8 Media Alternative Pre Recorded. This is another level AAA, and we’re now going to need to require, if we’re going to meet this criterion, an alternative for time based media for all pre recorded synchronized media, and for all prerecorded video only media. So basically what this means is you’re going to have some sort of doc or article that has correctly sequenced text descriptions of any time based visual or auditory information and providing a means for kind of any interaction that would have taken place in a time based way.

So basically a document that provides the, almost the same experience, right, as, or not almost, the exact same experience, or the exact same information for all pre recorded and all video only.

Amber: Yeah, almost like a script, right, where it has scene descriptions and what someone said, labeled, and all that kind of stuff.

And then the we’ve got 1. 2. 9, Audio Only, Live, and this is also a AAA, and this just says you have to have an alternative for any time based media that presents equivalent information for live audio only content. So if you’re doing something live and you wanted to meet this, you would have to, you know, maybe have someone writing real time descriptions of the scene in writing while you were doing your live presentation.

So a blind person could maybe access that. Or if it’s audio only, actually, sorry, then, you know, for the audio, inserting extra things or making sure you have live captioning, that kind of stuff. So, so they’re broken up. There’s some that were impact the prerecorded, so things done in advance.

And those are mostly the AA, and then a lot of the AAA are requirements on live media content. So I know, I want to talk a little bit more through these different, the three different things that the success criteria touch on, which are captions, and transcripts, and audio description, because we sometimes get questions about them.

I feel like captions is one that a lot of people are starting to to recognize the importance of, even if they have never heard of website accessibility or know that’s a thing. And for that reason I think it’s a little bit easier sometimes to talk, you know, your clients into it or other people who are creating videos at your organization into why they need to create captions.

How Captioning and Transcribing Benefits Everyone

Amber: But I think we still occasionally get some questions about that and, you know, why do captions matter? Do I have to have captions on this? And I’m curious, Chris. When clients ask that question to you, how do you answer that question?

Chris: I typically give the example where I ask, you know, have you ever been in a noisy and crowded space and needed to consume video content for whatever reason?

Maybe you’re at an airport waiting for your flight. And there’s the constant, you know, hustle and bustle in the airport announcer blaring overhead and, you know, you don’t have your headphones captions would be pretty useful in that scenario, right? And I think that’s one that a lot of people, particularly in like a B2B setting can relate to, and they can see themselves in that situation and why that would be beneficial.

And then I try to tie it back. Like if I know what kind of video content they have, so I can just then segue that to, so imagine your customers are evaluating the spec video on XYZ product or whatever it is, or your pitch deck video, right? And they’re in a crowded, busy airport, and they can’t hear anything that’s being said.

They don’t have any, you know, description of what’s happening. Do you think that’s going to be an optimal situation? Right? And the answer is invariably no.

But beyond the customer conversations, this is just kind of an anecdote that I found really fascinating and this was an interaction I had with our two oldest daughters, just like two or three days ago. I kept noticing that when we would go, there’s a show we’re watching together on Netflix, and every time I would go to turn it on, the captions would be turned on. If I’m in my normal, you know, home watching a video, I tend to find the captions distracting personally. It’s not that I don’t use captions at all. It’s just, if it’s in a typical situation, I don’t enable them. And so I asked them to turn them off and they actually pushed back and they were like, no we turn those on because it helps us focus on what’s being said.

And pay closer attention to the video versus having them off. And I found that really interesting that’s kind of how they see captions and it’s actually helping them, I guess, focus on and pay attention to the video more than they otherwise would. And maybe that’s a generational difference. I’m not sure. It probably is. But I thought that was particularly interesting.

Amber: That’s interesting. I was not there for that conversation. You know what that makes me wonder? They feel like they want to read something and reading something on the screen is what stops them from getting their phone and going like this and second screening it.

So instead they’re like, oh, I’m reading. It keeps them focused on the show. That’s really interesting.

Steve: Yeah, I think there’s some science around like modern cinema and TV around the way that they mic actors and stuff, that it actually is harder to understand what they’re saying these days. And like, I guess like a lot of actors will try to act more naturally in their dialect.

So they’ll mumble, right? Where we, you know, where in the past they would speak very proper and stuff in film and stuff. So like, I do, I, we find ourselves turning captions on quite a bit. Especially like, like if we’re watching something that’s in like an English accent, right? Like, and it’s a real thick English accent we’re turning on and it helps, but like, we’ve recently had like, so my kids are on swim team and my daughter, Claire is real susceptible to getting swimmer’s ear, which is just like water buildup in, in, in their ear.

And so the last few weeks she’s really been struggling with like a water buildup in her left ear and we’re watching a movie the other night. And she’s like, turn the captions on. And like, she’s like, I can’t hear out of my left ear. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. Right. And You know, and it’s like, it highlights the benefits of having captions, not just for, you know, people, you know, the deaf.

Right. And it’s like, well, she doesn’t need them all the time, but she’s got this temporarily, temporary disability because of the water buildup in her ear and she can’t, everything’s muffled, right? So she needs to rely on that. And it’s great that it’s there. Right?

Amber: Yeah, I saw a study earlier this year that said 50% of Americans watch videos with captions and subtitles most of the time when they’re surveyed, 50%.

Steve: Yeah, and like, I mean, like just a little nugget, like when you’re watching like a mystery or something, like sometimes the song that’s playing in the background and sometimes the little chatter in the background of shows will give you hints to like, you know, who the killer is, right?

Like, or, right? Like, or whodunit, right? And it’ll like, you know, it’ll put the song title on there or sometimes it’ll even like show the lyric that’s being sang and a lot of, and a lot of cinema and stuff, they’re doing that, those as hints or little Easter Eggs to kind of lead you on. And like, sometimes when you don’t have captions on, you don’t catch those things.

So it’s pretty neat.

Amber: Yeah, well, I want to talk about transcripts, but before we do that, let’s take a quick commercial break and we’ll be right back.

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This is ice cold now.

Amber: Oh yeah?

And now you like it?

Steve: I’m going to tip up. I’m going to, I’m going to tip my thumbs up. Up a little bit.

Chris: Your ice melted. You kind of made it more of a light beer now.

Steve: Yeah. I’m not going to be, I’m going to be, I’ll be able to be productive this afternoon.

Yeah.

Amber: Yeah.

How Captioning and Transcribing Benefits Everyone (Continued)

Chris: All right. So Amber wants to talk about transcripts. And during our commercial break, I was thinking that, you know, we have situations where we have these captioned videos, right? They’re accurately captioned by a human. And we get the question, do we still need transcripts if we have those captions?

And I see customers pushing back on this occasionally. What are some things you say to them, Amber, on those check in calls where they ask these kinds of questions?

Amber: Yeah, I think what’s helpful is giving them some information about the different audiences that can benefit from transcripts outside of captions.

So, most people can connect captions with being hard of hearing or deaf. But of course, being able to read captions requires sight. Captions are not surfaced to a screen reader, for example. And there are people who, for example, are deaf blind, who use a screen reader not with, for the audio because they can’t hear the audio, but so that it can actually output to a refreshable Braille display and then they read the Braille and that is how they get that.

Well, if you only have captions, then they’re going to miss out on the content of the video. So having a transcript is very helpful for people who are deafblind on the accessibility front. But there’s a lot of other benefits of having transcripts. One of which is that it can help your SEO. It gets extra content on the page sometimes depending upon how you implement them.

But another one is they’re searchable. So even the ones that are included in video players and maybe we can talk about that in a minute, Steve. Like Vimeo has one where it’ll pull the transcript in from the side. It has a search feature and you can search or you can scroll through, find, and if you click it, then it jumps to that point of the video.

Which is really nice. I think for some people find that helpful to be able to read and follow along outside of the captions or see it in a broader context, because maybe if you’re, you need captions, cause you’re hard of hearing, but maybe you’re not a super fast reader and the speed of the video is fast, those captions might go by quickly.

And so having the transcript there gives you more time to view the text. So I think there’s really a lot of benefits to transcripts. For everyone, but for sure for different populations that we might not think about.

Chris: The other one is just general content generation and content recycling into different mediums. I’ve seen instances where people will take a full manual, you know, accurate transcript, feed that into a language model and have it output, you know, various summaries and things like that. And then they will proofread and edit those down to make them, you know, accurate and have no imaginary things in them.

And then they will put that out as additional content or summary articles or additional blog posts. I think, yeah there’s numerous benefits.

Amber: If you’re trying to build a content machine, creating captions and transcripts for your video can then be used to turn into like helpful content, which is really good.

But I think too, like sometimes people push back about it because they just think, well, the design of my page is going to be really weird, if I have transcripts. Or there’s not space on this page for a transcript. Like it’s easy for us to think about, oh, in a blog post where there’s a video and there’s just like a wall of text with some headings. Like, of course, putting a transcript in that is easy, but you know, other pages, other layouts.

The Numerous Options for Putting Transcripts on a Page

Amber: So I’m curious, Steve, if you could maybe talk about some of the options for putting transcripts on a page beyond just like, pasting the text literally onto the page.

Steve: Sure. So just like you mentioned, there’s video players that actually will allow you to input a transcript text into the video player, and then it has its own, it’s own display of that built into the player.

The Able Player which is available on GitHub. It’s a free, it’s free, right? It’s completely free WordPress plugin. And, you know, Vimeo and Wistia have their own transcript built into their player. You can do things on the page, like you can add accordions.

Below the video content and that way, you know, it requires somebody to toggle that accordion open to be able to display it. This is actually the way that we handle this most of the time. You can create a button that will actually pop up a modal as long as it’s coded accessibly, make sure your modal is accessible.

Especially, you know, especially if it has a transcript in it. And And then you can just link, you can link a document. You can link a document that can be downloaded or opened in a new tab or opened in the same tab with that transcript as well. So that’s just a few of the ways.

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s this thought that, oh, it’s going to make my website ugly or add too much noise or whatever.

I think there’s lots of creative ways that you can still make transcripts available to people without overwhelming, like taking up a huge amount of text, which obviously if you’ve had a one hour webinar or whatever, that’s fine. It’s going to be a lot of text in a transcript, but I don’t think that it has to necessarily appear.

And as long as it’s very clear and easy to find, right? Like if you, like you were talking about the modal, if you have a button that says transcript.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: Like, and it’s very close to the video player, or maybe even added into the video player, depending upon what player you’re using. Like that should be sufficient.

Steve: Yeah. I actually like I like the accordion or the modal way of doing this just because it’s a, It’s almost like a skip link of sorts, right? Like the keyboard user doesn’t have to like read through that whole transcript to get to whatever is after it. You know, they can get to it, they can be informed of exactly what it is, and then they can choose to initiate it.

How (Accurate) Captions and Transcripts Get Generated

Steve: So that’s kind of the method that I prefer. So, how exactly do we generate captions for our trans, transcripts? Well, I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. How exactly do we generate captions and transcripts?

Chris: There’s different ways to do it. I’ll lead with I’ll lead with how I do it because I actually do our, I currently do our captioning and transcription for this podcast.

So we use a tool called Descript and the way that Descript works is you can feed in audio and video files into it, and then it will basically try to auto transcribe or auto caption them with timestamps and sync those up with what’s being said in the video and basically tie the written text to the video or audio content.

And then you can go in and in their system and basically manually edit it. There are different options for editing. So if you delete something, it deletes the corresponding video and audio segment, which is a really cool feature. So if you need to cut stuff out, you can very easily do that and be editing your captions and transcription at the same time.

And then you have the ability to correct as well or change who’s speaking. If you have speakers assigned if it’s a multi speaker video. So there’s a whole lot of features in there. And in addition to that, what I really appreciate about it is it’s also like a reasonable, I would say reasonable, like audio and video editing tool as well.

You can do basic, you know, audio cleanup, adjusting, you know, levels making sure that it’s, the audio itself is clear and you can stitch audio and video files together. So I’m impressed with the tool overall, and I think it’s a way to speed up the process of generating accurate captions. In my experience, the shortcomings of Descript really are just down to if there’s like a lot of crosstalk, where people are kind of talking over one another, it really struggles with that. And I find most of the mistakes it makes are when people are speaking over one another or interrupting one another, it has trouble parsing, A, who’s talking and B, catching everything that’s being said.

And then the other thing that I think it, it can struggle with at times is if you’re using like inner industry specific terminology or acronyms or software names, or even just saying like saying URLs like website URLs, it really struggles with that too. And it will do weird stuff.

So it’s definitely like what it’s putting out, a human has to review, but I’m getting to the point where I can listen to this and edit in near real time on one and a half or one and three quarters speed and basically power through. And they have lots of keyboard shortcuts to speed it up. And I would say probably if this is like a 40 or 50 minute episode, I can usually have it edited and accurate within about two hours.

Give or take which is pretty good considering how much we all sometimes talk over one another, depending on if it’s a really scripted episode and very structured like this one, or some of our more free flowing conversation episodes. Those tend to take longer to edit because there’s not like this rigid plan that we’re kind of working through.

Amber: Are we going to tell our audience now that we got scolded by you for interrupting each other too much? And now we’re trying to be super polite because it was making your transcription work way harder.

Chris: But if you don’t want to deal with all those headaches and scold your coworkers about speaking over one another and causing the transcripts and captions to mess up what do you do, Amber?

Amber: You hire a vendor to do it for you. I, so we have, well, we, we use a couple of different vendors and I have experience with them both from what Equalize does with some of our clients. Because we have a vendor who captions videos for us, but the client didn’t want to deal with it. So we did, we manage it, they pay us, right?

We also have at our meetup live captioning. So that it will be accessible. It has a certified human captioner who comes, joins the meetup and types in the caption box in Zoom, which of course, none of us would actually be qualified to do. I 100 percent cannot type that fast or accurately. It would be very bad if I had to type the captions.

Chris: To clarify for our audience, that’s a certified captioner who is human, not a certified human comma captioner. Because I don’t think we need a certified, a human certification. Just a little joke there.

Amber: I mean, someday with the direction AI is going, there might be a human certification where you have to get certified that you are human and not a robot.

Chris: Certified Human.

Amber: No. So, and then also with WordPress Accessibility Day we have vendors who do the captioning during the event. And then after the fact they do all of the transcription. The first two years we had volunteers doing the transcription and it took a long time and then we realized we just need to budget in the event budget to pay a company to take our videos and deliver us transcripts because they turn them around in seven days. And it, you know, it’s great. As opposed to three months later, here’s the videos from the conference. So, so yeah, I mean, I think if you don’t have the time or the resources to do it in house then potentially hiring vendors is the right solution.

And I think you kind of have to figure out what the line is there on video length versus your budget. I also use Descript like when I make those short like YouTube videos or incidental things. I will just do it myself because we don’t have an infinite budget to just constantly be saying, Hey, I want, you know, I want this.

And also, you know, if you need it tomorrow, the fee is higher. So, so we do a lot in house, but then we’ve kind of drawn the line at the Meetups, which are 90 minutes long and can sometimes get kind of technical. And so they require a little bit, like a lot of attention to detail. But we are still doing our own transcription for the podcast for now.

Chris: I will say too, I think it was a logical choice because the podcast is one of the things that we edit more heavily than Meetup. Meetup is usually like one take. We don’t really cut almost anything out. Whereas with the podcast, we’re trying to like clean up audio, clean up video have it come out with like not a lot of cross talk, not a lot of uhs and ums and filler words, right?

And so since I, I was already in there doing that work and doing that editing, it just made sense to just, you know, take a little extra time and just do the transcription and captioning too.

Amber: Yeah, I’ll say too, a lot of the hosts, like YouTube has a tool, so if you’re uploading your videos to YouTube, they have something that will auto generate and then allow you to correct the captions.

So, there, there are definitely a lot of tools out there, many of which are free and don’t require a budget.

What Audio Description Actually Does for Multimedia

Steve: Well, that answers the question about transcripts and captions, but what about audio descriptions? What is an audio description and how do I know if I need it?

Amber: Yeah, so audio description and we can definitely link this in the show notes. I have a few meetup episodes relevant to this that I think we can throw in there.

And one of them was Joel Snyder gave this phenomenal presentation called, If Your Eyes Could Speak, about audio description. So what audio description is a as we talked about a little bit before, It is a verbal description of anything important that is happening in a video. A really great example that is relevant to our audience is if you think about some of those WordPress plug in demo videos.

that are telling you how to go configure a certain setting in a WordPress plugin. A lot of times when you open those, sometimes they only have music and they literally have no talking at all. And they’re just moving their mouse around in the back end of a WordPress website. Other times it’ll, someone will say, go to the back of your website and click here, and then on this page, scroll down to this section and toggle the button on, and then hit save.

Right? Well, if you just heard that right then, could you have pictured where you were supposed to go and what you were supposed to be clicking on? Probably not. So, so really like audio description is making sure that if someone can’t see the visuals in a video, that they still know what they need to do or still understand the important information.

I think we’ve seen this on some of our government or education clients too, where they’ve created videos that have just words in them. Like you’re supposed to read the words and there’s no spoken audio. Well, that’s the similar situation. If you can’t read the words. Then you wouldn’t be able to do it.

Steve: I think most movie theaters offer and right, an audio description supplement to, you know, for people that need that kind of assistance that actually describes what’s going on in the movie rather than, you know, just sitting there and somebody, you know, like a blind user just sitting there listening to it.

Amber: Well, yeah. Could you imagine like in a fight scene at an action movie?

Steve: Yeah.

Chris: Those descriptions, genuine effort is put into making them feel like the way that you’re supposed to feel, but they’re not telling you how to feel. They’re showing, not telling, right?

But like the way that they will actually verbally describe a mountaintop or a Victorian woman’s dress in a dance scene, you know, or what, or a fight scene in a superhero movie. Like they really get into it with some, some cool arrangements of words and wordsmithing. And I can see why, like, if you have the audio description and the spoken audio, how a movie can be super entertaining, even if you’re not seeing the movie. Right?

Amber: Hey, I love audio books. And my assumption is that an audio described movie is like an audio book, but better because it has sound effects too.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, there’s books like that, right? There’s dramatization books, like, that’s, that,

Amber: Where they add music and things?

Steve: Well, like, you know, they have different people doing all the characters and then there’s, you know, there’s lots of sound effects and background music and stuff. And, you know, I’ve listened to a lot of those while I’m working, you know, because it’s like, you don’t have to look at anything. You just kind of listen.

Amber: You can code and listen to a book at the same time?

Steve: Yeah, I can’t do silence. Yeah, I did, it’s that or, you know, something really loud and heavy, like really, like puts me in the zone.

Amber: I did run a poll on Twitter. a month or so ago, asking how people felt about listening to musical theater while they were working.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: Because I love to listen to Broadway show tunes. Pretty sure Chris is really glad that we have separate offices now.

You don’t want the show tunes. You want something else.

Steve: No, I want I want somebody screaming in my ear. That really brings, that closes the world in. And…

Amber: This is the rage against the code machine.

Steve: Rage against the code machine, I like that.

What Does This All Cost?

Chris: So, I’m the numbers guy. What does all this cost? I’m probably going to answer my own questions since I do all the numbers, but maybe…

Amber: I think we should be real. I want to be real. I want to share actual costs here. So people know. Do you want to start with what do we pay for live captioning and post event transcription for WordPress Accessibility Meetup?

Chris: So the live captioning piece, which I believe is always fulfilled by Texas Closed Captions. That runs us about 600 a month, for two Meetups.

Amber: That are nine, well…

Chris: They’re 90 minutes each.

Amber: I think we get, but they, we have buffer 15, so I think we pay them for two hours for each meetup because we have a 15 minute buffer, ‘because they have to come in the front to get set up. And then sometimes we have speakers that run long and so we, we include a 15 minute buffer at the end. So we don’t have to be like, you’re done now.

Chris: Steve over here, partner at the business. He’s like, we pay what?

Steve: What? How much?

Chris: I know it’s.

Steve: Let me get my calculator.

Amber: It’s on our budget. Weren’t you paying attention at the last owner’s meeting?

Chris: This is the cost. This is the cost of doing it right. Right? So that’s Texas Closed Captions. And then Empire Captions who we pay for some post event transcription, and some miscellaneous things for customers. If I split out the stuff that we do for some customers who are running their transcription through us, if I split that out, we’re probably paying them between 250 and 325 dollars a month, somewhere in there for the post event transcription. So all in, we’re close to 1, 000 a month or about 500 something per or about 400 upper fours, low fives per meetup, basically. For captioning and transcription.

Amber: My estimate on that was it’s, it costs us at least 1, 350 a month to run meetup.

Oh, I included the Zoom webinars in that cost.

Chris: Yeah, but we’re not talking about the cost of Meetup. We’re talking about the cost of the accessibility components. And then if you if you layer on ASL interpretation on top of that, if you’re looking to fulfill like a AAA requirement for live events, that’s going to add another like 400 dollars or so to the cost per month which we don’t always get to do because of sponsorships not lining up or not having enough sponsorships, because we always try to cover the captioning first before we go full AAA with the ASL interpretation.

Steve: So that’s, so, so that’s not an incon insignificant amount of money, right?

That there’s a real cost to that. So like, you know, and if we’re running a meetup, right, which is, you know, it’s not a it’s not a revenue generating thing per se, right? A direct revenue generating thing. How do we offset those costs?

Amber: Yeah, so we have had in the past, there was one time where we had something that was not meetup. It was our own event. And because it, Meetup is an interesting, unique animal because that is something that we are volunteering and giving back to the WordPress community. We follow all of the WordPress community foundation rules, which includes we can’t pay our speakers.

It also includes we never charge attendees. We don’t gate the videos afterwards. So that’s just something that we’ve decided internally is important for us to do. And so we do it. We have gotten permission to bring in sponsors and we have sponsors who have very generously at times.

There are some openings right now, if anyone’s listening to this. But that wasn’t the intent of talking about cost.

Yeah, what I think is a bigger takeaway though on this question for our listeners, because they’re not all going to run free meetups that they can’t charge for it and bring sponsors in for, right?

Now that said, if you want to do that and you want to make it accessible, I think there, there are ways that fits into a marketing budget and we fit it into our marketing. Like we call it marketing because you have to line item it somewhere. And I don’t know where you put donating to WordPress community under, we’re just like, that’s marketing, right?

But of course, if you’re gathering people’s emails and other things, there might be benefits that you get out of that. And then maybe you make, they come to you for other things. But if you’re not, what I was going to say was we ran a different event that was not part of Meetup where we sold. Our goal on that event had been to break even.

So we figured out what our cost for the captioning would be. And also we brought in a speaker from the Carroll Center for the Blind. Who is like, his job is to train people on how to use screen readers, and he was going to do this, but we had to pay him. So, so we were like, okay, let’s figure out how much we have to pay him, and how much we have to pay for captioning, and then we’re basically like, this is the minimum amount of people that we are going to allow to register.

And if only, you know, only four people register for this event, we’re going to cancel it, because we didn’t want to have to charge this huge amount, so we had to figure out how much are we willing to charge for people to attend. And then we just said, and luckily we got more than our minimums. We were able to run the event.

We actually made money off of it, which was fabulous. So I think, you know, if you are an organization who wants to make things accessible, you, and you’re running paid conferences or whatever, you just have to work those in your budget. WordPress Accessibility Day includes sign language interpretation for live, because we wanted to meet that AAA requirement.

It is not, right, like, it is not inexpensive. Our let me look real quick. This budget, which can be found, it’s not private. It’s public on the WordPress Accessibility Day financial transparency, let’s see. We paid for a 24 hour conference, we paid $4,130 for live captioning. $6,435 for sign language interpreters.

The post event transcription was $1,560. So, you know, like we’re sitting at about $12,500, just in accessibility for that event, but we budgeted it in and then we plan for sponsors to come in and cover that cost. So I think you just have to think about how can you make that cost work within your organization and where’s the benefit.

Removing Multimedia Rather Than Provide a Text Alternative

Amber: Now that said, there is some reality that sometimes captioning things, you can’t do, and we’ve had customers come to us where, Hey, they’ve been generating a lot of video content for 15 years and they’ve never captioned any of it. And now they’re in trouble, like with the government or the Department of Justice in the United States.

And they are being told they have to caption all of their videos, which if you had done it yourself incrementally over time, it’s not that big of a deal, but now you’re looking at captioning thousands of videos. So sometimes the answer is you remove content. I don’t know that’s great but in order to be compliant and get out of trouble with the government, the solution is if you don’t have the budget to caption something, you just take it offline for everyone.

And I think there’s a, an article we can link. It’s kind of older from like 2017 maybe, where Berkeley did this because they got in trouble, they had over 20,000 recordings from classes of professors giving lectures and they just said the cost of us going through and captioning, you know, 20,000 one hour videos.

Even if you’re paying $2, you know, $1.50 a minute, imagine what the cost of that is, right? And so their solution was they just took it off the internet. I don’t know. I don’t know what you guys think about that as a, as an answer, but that is something that some of our clients do sometimes. They just take content down.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think that as regulation of accessibility tightens globally, I may have even said this before on this podcast, the internet as a whole may get a little smaller as content, I mean, I, in an ideal world, right, it’s content that isn’t really serving anyone that gets removed or gets archived as parts of these processes, right?

It’s something that, and I don’t know what percentage of UC Berkeley’s videos that they took offline were even getting viewed, right? Right? Maybe only 1 or 5 percent of the videos were getting viewed. Now, what I think would be interesting, if I were, you know, helping run that remediation effort with UC Berkeley or in the room, I’d advocate for trying to figure out what, which of those videos are actually getting watched and arguing for, well, can we caption and transcribe 1% of these?

And can we identify that 1%, keep them offline and then archive the 99% and maybe come back to them later or unarchive them on request, right? There’s mechanisms for this that, that organizations can pursue to not just eliminate what arguably could have been a public good that has been stricken off the internet now, kind of wholesale.

Like, I think there is a middle ground. It’s not all or nothing. And I hope more organizations can kind of get out of all or nothing thinking with this and try to approach it smartly.

Steve: Yeah, totally. And I mean, I think too, if you know, to maybe speak to the smaller, like WordPress blog individuals and it’s, you know, maybe research some of the tools, like the tool that Chris mentioned that we use, and he spends a little bit of his own time to ensure that those captions are correct.

There’s a lot of AI tools out. I’m not advocating for any of those. I’m just saying. Take a little bit of time and maybe look and see if that’s a viable solution for you to get captions or a transcript generated from your video at a minimal or no cost. But I would just, you know, advocate, read through it.

Don’t take it, don’t take it at its face with anything with AI these days. It does great work, but you got to double check it. But just put some of that top of mind, just because you don’t have a huge budget to spend on that. It’s maybe there’s a way to, to achieve that on a smaller scale as well.

Amber: Yeah, I think my advice on this too, you know, as we’re kind of wrapping up here is I would think about how the, how you can, like Chris was talking about earlier, repurposing content and reusing content and trying to think about transcripts and generating transcripts for old videos that exist and weren’t captioned and transcribed in the first place.

I know that can seem like a big expense and just like, oh, what’s the benefit of this when I’ve had it out? But really, renewing old content is a really great marketing strategy and is a worthwhile effort of, you know, if you have a content team, if you have a marketing person, you don’t necessarily always just have to add new.

So maybe one month, instead of adding new, you go back through and improve old content. And that could be adding captions to a video, adding a transcript to the post, adding headings, maybe even, I mean, I’ve seen people say, you know, if you go back through your YouTube videos and add like chapters to them and stuff, you can increase viewership.

So I don’t, I think sometimes people think of, I put that content out there now, it’s done. And the reality is that content in the best scenario is kind of a living thing that you’re managing, monitoring. I mean, you could even go look at your SEO and see is this ranking, you know, are these things that, oh, okay, well this is in the top 10, but it’s not as high as I want, or it’s there, but it’s hardly getting any clicks.

Maybe I need to go do some things to fix that content and that will bring more people to it, or that will make more people stay on the page or go somewhere else, right? And accessibility, I think is a big part of that strategy just cause it just overall makes your content more absorbable by everyone.

Chris: Yeah. Imagine going back and transcribing or captioning a handful or a dozen or 20 or 50 videos and opening them up to potentially 20% more people, which I think…

Amber: Or 50% if we just, that study I’ve read is right.

Chris: I think given how many people actually use captions, it’s probably a bigger number, but I’m trying to err on the small end. Yeah, I think it’s probably more than 20%.

Steve: Well, and the SEO benefit of adding that to your content too, right? Can increase, you know, more views to that post or page or whatever it is, you know?

Amber: Mmhmm. Well, I think we have some other great resources on like the technicality of captioning and transcription that I wanted to mention before we sign off.

We’ll link to them in the show notes. Merryl Evans, one of our friends from the Dallas area, she gave a talk a while back now at a WordPress Accessibility Meetup, she’s an accessibility specialist, she is deaf, about how to create accessible captions. And she gave a phenomenal presentation showing like what what good captions or bad captions are, because if you’re doing open captions where they’re just always visible on the video, sometimes people try to get fancy and they do weird things that make them hard to read.

So, definitely check that out for a captioning resource. And then also Daniel Sommer from Empire Captions gave a really interesting talk on different types of transcription for real time captioning and real time transcription for live events. So we can link that. And of course the one I previously mentioned on Joel.

Joel’s presentation on audio description. Is there anything else that either of you want to say before we sign off about multimedia accessibility?

Chris: I’ll just say that Joel Snyder has one of the best voices I have ever heard. And I know that he does a lot of their audio description recordings or did early on with his company, but he’s got like the quintessential, like, action movie, like, announcer slash radio voice. It’s really good.

Steve: In a world…

Chris: Yeah, exactly. I could hear him doing that.

Amber: Have we turned that one into the podcast? Is that available on Accessibility Craft also? Is it was before we were putting meetups.

Chris: It probably is because I liked that presentation, so like the legacy episodes, I’ll sometimes if we need a filler, I’ll go cherry pick one. So I probably did that one, but we can double check in the show notes.

Amber: Yeah, so it, it might be on AccessibilityCraft.Com, but if it’s not, it’s definitely, we’ll link in the show notes over on the Equalize Digital blog and the Equalize Digital meetup page will have a link to it as well.

Well, I’m gonna, I’m almost, I’ve got about half this beer left, but I’m going to finish it up because I really like it. And I thank you, Chris, for getting a stout. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Steve: I still have some ice in there. You guys hear it?

Amber: Steve.

Chris: I decided to be nice to you this time. Just wait until the next recording.

Steve: Uh oh.

Amber: Oh boy. !

Steve: Oh, I’ve already got it in the cabinet. I know.

Amber: Everybody’s got to tune in. You’re going to refrigerate the next one though, right, Steve?

Steve: Well…

Amber: I’m fairly certain that someone’s going to tweet at you or social media you somewhere about putting ice in your beer.

Chris: Maybe this is how we go viral.

Steve: That was, that was on the fly. I mean, like, and I will say that icing this beer is actually really good. I don’t know what it is. It’s…

Amber: I should go see if I have vanilla ice cream and just pop a scoop in here. That is what I think I want. I think I want to put a scoop of vanilla ice cream in this beer.

Chris: All right. Well, I think that’s it for the podcast for this week, but we will wish you all farewell and happy captioning and transcribing. Hopefully we’ve convinced a few people.

Amber: Yeah.

Steve: All right. See you guys.

Chris: Bye.

Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft 5 stars on Apple Podcasts.

Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.Com.