Designing for Accessibility Make Your Image, Audio, and Video Accessible

Images, audio, and video can add depth and interest to an online course for all students; however, information will need to be provided in alternate media formats.

Images

Text should be written so it is meaningful without images. A good rule of thumb is an image should reinforce the text material but not add additional information. If the images do add any new information it should be included in the alternate text (also know as alt text).

One useful way to think about images is to ask yourself the following question: Can all students obtain the necessary information about the image through either the surrounding text content or the alt text? If not, then students with visual disabilities are at a disadvantage.

Some images are decorative and do not add any value to the person using a screen reader. Consider using the Null alt text instead of a descriptive text. The screen reader will know to skip over these images. In Canvas, the Null alt text is invoked by leaving the alt text field blank.

Complex images that include data, charts, statistics are best described in context around it. Other options are to redirect to another web page with a longer description or to use captions. Both of these options require additional HTML editing.

An alt text description is not the same as a tooltip. A tooltip is what you see when you hover over an image. Hover over the image below. Alt text is read aloud by screen readers but tooltips are not.

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If you are using Canvas and have images in your course, the following video (4:34 min) takes you through the process of adding alt text to images.

More Information on Effectively Captioning Images

The Diagram Center provides resources to help content creators provide effective image descriptions, including the Poet Image Description Training Tool, which provides hands-on practice for captioning complex images such as flow charts and Venn diagrams.

Audio

A transcript (verbatim script of the audio content) of audio files is required to make them accessible; the transcript should be provided at the same time the audio is made available.

Video

For all videos, the text must be accurate and synchronized with the video using captions. Captions can be either open (part of the video/always visible) or closed (can be turned on/off). Transcripts of the video are not sufficient by themselves but can certainly provide additional benefits to some users.

Do you have any videos that need to be captioned? Please refer to the resources below for information on captioning video.

Resources

Below are some ways you can incorporate captioning into your videos.

Ask the author or producer of video if a captioned version is available.
Upload the video to Panopto and use the built-in Panopto speech-to-text captioning (editing will be necessary to correct errors)
Upload your video to Youtube and use their captioning service. Please be aware you will still need to edit your captions as the transcript will not be accurate.
Contact NCSSM's Instructional & Information Designer, Rob Caldwell, to request paid captioning services.