The more commonly understood piece is captions: that`s where we`re trying to make sure that

the audio content of the video is accessible to people who cannot hear. That means that

all dialog and important sounds are turned into a written caption or a written transcript

that is then time-synced to the video. It`s also valuable that - when adding the caption

- that you also make the pure transcript, in a text format, available. While this is

not a technical requirement - to make the transcript by itself accessible and available

to people – I would highly recommend it. If you`ve gone to the effort to add a time-sync

caption to your video that means that you have a transcript file available. Why is the

transcript file useful? Because for people who may need to slow down and read that content

or to reread it or who are easily distracted by, perhaps, what`s happening visually on

the screen; they can focus on that text transcript and sometimes get better access to the information.

So I think of it as a double bonus. The additional piece that a lot of people are not aware of

for making video content accessible is called “audio description,” and this accessibility

is for a whole different type of user disability; and that is for people who cannot see. What

we`re trying to do is describe what is important happening visually in the video to make sure

that they get all that content. In the example of this video, you wouldn`t need very much

audio description because what we`re dealing with here is a video of me talking directly

to the camera and there`s nothing critical being shown. There`s no graph, there`s no

demonstration where I`m saying, “And look here, you can obviously see what`s occurring

in this demo.” If there were that type of element happening, you would need an audio

description. My best way of describing audio description is: imagine you`re at a movie

and you`re blind. Imagine you`re in a horror movie, and you`re blind, and you`re only listening

to the dialog. And, for those who can see, there`s a shadow on the wall of someone holding

a gun. This is a really important visual element that would need to be audio described to the user.