Accessibility

It is important to make sure that your streaming audio/video is accessible for individuals with disabilities. For audio files this can simply be providing a link to a text transcript. For video files, a text transcript and captions are necessary.

Captions can be added to video in several ways. One is pre-production, a method of adding captioning prior to rendering out video to a streaming file. In this way, the captions are actually part of the video. The other way to add captioning is post-production, where captions are added after the video has been rendered to a streaming file. Post-production captioning is the preferred and most common method. The following table lists the technologies used in post-production captioning:

For more information on how to create captioning files, please see the resources listed below.

Resources

MAGpie (Media Access Generator)
http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/

WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
http://www.webaim.org/articles/ (see the Rich Media Accessiblity area)