Inclusive Design 24 is a free online conference that focuses on inclusive design and accessibility. It starts tonight at 8:00pm and runs for 24 straight hours. More information, including the schedule, is available on the Inclusive Design 24 website. You can also follow along on Twitter using the #id24 hashtag.
Captioning is one of those things we need to do, we need to have the time to do and some of us cringe when we are tasked with the process. So how do ‘we’ caption our videos quickly, accurately and at not a great expense to your department? Rev.com (https://rev.com)
Rev.com will provide caption service for a $1.00 per minute. Rev.com makes it easy to use and Rev.com is accurate and quick. Here are simple steps:
Eleven (11) hours later, 158 minutes of video was captioned.
When I logged back in, the options are to:
I previewed the video. Verified the content was accurate and the spelling was accurate. I spent more time writing down where the few errors were than editing the items.
In the Edit view, I am moved to a new page where I can change spelling, change atmospherics, remove gaps and a few other things. I used CTRL + F or the magnifying glass and I searched for the text I needed to change and either replaced all items or just a one at a time.
It was easy and not intimidating at all.
Once I made the changes in Edit Mode I was able to download any of the following text formats (I did multiple versions *.rst and *.txt):
The file is zipped to your computer.
Make sure your original video is in your video manager in YouTube. Go to add captions on your video and upload your *.rst file. I rewatched the first 10 minutes of the videos with the captioning provided by Rev.com and it was perfect.
Simple, easy and fast… No stress as well.
A SUNY colleague recently shared a great resource from the federal government (hat tip to Rebecca Mushtare from Oswego). The Accessibility for Teams website is “a quick-start guide for embedding accessibility and inclusive design practices into your team’s workflow.” It is organized around various roles including product, content, UX, visual design, and front end. I recommending checking it out.
One of the keys to make your website more accessibility is to understand how people with various disabilities use the web. The Home Office Digital Team at gov.uk has created a great set of posters on designing for accessibility that includes a wide range of users. The set contains posters on:
The posters are available through a creative commons licence. Here is the full accessibility-posters-set (PDF). I plan on printing these posters for our office suite which will be a great reminder on the inclusive approach to web design.
On June 5, 2018, the W3C published version 2.1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG 2.1 retains all the success criteria from WCAG 2.0 and adds 17 new success criteria across the current A, AA, and AAA standards.
At UB, we will continue to use the current WCAG 2.0 AA standard for our website remediation efforts. That being said, I recommend that everyone become familiar with WCAG 2.1. At some point in the future we will transition to the new standards. Here are some links to get you started:
The Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has created this blog to share accessibility related news and announcements for the UB community. We will be sharing news related to both our accessibility efforts here at UB, news about work being done at SUNY administration, and national news. If there are specific topics you would like to see included, please let us know.
For those of you interested, a11y is short for accessibility. It follows an ICT convention of shortening long words by using a format AnnB where A is the first letter of the word, B is the last letter of the word, and nn is the number of letters between the first and last letter. A11y includes the first and last letters of “accessibility”, and 11 is remaining number of letters in between. A11y was first created as a hashtag on social media when Twitter had a limit of 140 characters. Replacing #accessibility with #a11y freed up 9 extra characters.