OpenSpeaks/3.0/Accessibility

This page will help you learn how your audience can easily listen to/watch your audio/video.

Imagine you are creating audio or video content in a particular language. You plan to share that content on YouTube or Facebook or WeChat or elsewhere. You want everyone to be able to listen/watch them easily. But some might have deafness. So, they cannot hear the audio. But they can read if the audio is written on the screen.

You might not always know if some of your viewers have deafness, blindness or any other special needs. But just by showing the text on screen can help people with deafness. you might have seen how foreign language films have such texts appearing on the screen (see the image on the right side: it is taken from a cartoon video and the dialogue is showed on screen in English) . Those texts are called subtitles or captions.

[±] Solution for people with who have problems with hearing

As shared above, showing the audio as text on screen helps. The audio could be the sound of people speaking or a music being played or the sound of a bus. When anyone is speaking, the actual words can be showed on the screen. There are two ways this can be done for a video:

• a. editing the video and permanently adding the text over the video (known as "burned-in captioning" or "open captioning")
• b. creating separate files of video and text. This allows editing the text if needed or creating translation in multiple languages (You might have seen many YouTube videos with options to change the language for the captions/subtitles. This is called "Closed Captioning".)

[±] Solution for people with who have problems with seeing

People with some or full blindness depend a lot on the sound. They might or might not view the image of a video. Many video creators add background music to audio/videos. If you add extra sound effect or music, please make sure the main audio is louder than the music. A music video will of course have music. If a person is speaking in an interview or in any other audio/video, their voice should sound clear.

If there is too much background noise, you can edit the audio.

This link will open a tutorial for editing audio using a computer.

While using computers, people with blindness cannot use a mouse or trackpad. They depend on a keyboard to move from one part to another on a website. They use Tab ↹ key for moving from one part of the page to another. Most audio/video hosting platforms (e.g. Internet Archive, Youtube, Vimeo, SoundCloud) work fine only with keyboards. If you are embedding a video in a blog or website, please use headers. Headers make the font look big or small. Websites and blogs have a box for writing. A set of options generally appear on the top. You will mostly see an option called "Heading" there if the language is English. You can also choose "H1", "H2", "H3" to create a heading. Also, please add some description below the video.