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Accessible Multimedia on a Budget

taught by: Zoltan Hawryluk

Session Summary

If you deal with audio and video on the web or elsewhere, ensuring it is accessible can be challenging — captions, audio descriptions, transcripts, seizure inducing content and disruptive background sounds are just some of the things we need to worry about. In this session, we will explore many low-cost to no-cost solutions that can fix many of these problems.

Description

Whether you have a lot of legacy multimedia content or are a producer of new content, you don’t need to break the bank to get your work accessible. This talk will cover:

- Creating accurate closed captions quickly (with whisper.cpp, an open-source captioning, subtitling and transcription tool) and remediating them easily with a subtitle editor.

- Inserting computer generated audio descriptions in web video without remixing the audio track using AblePlayer.

- Detecting seizure inducing sequences in video using PEAT (freeware) and IRIS (open source).

- Reducing (or removing) background noise from existing recordings to make voices louder (even if you don’t have access to the pre-mixed audio files).

- Repairing damaged audio from old audio and video recordings (e.g. old audio recordings and video tapes, live recordings with dropouts, etc) as well as increasing the fidelity of badly recorded speech.

- Repairing low contrast text in video (without the need to access the original untouched footage).

- Pausing all animations on a webpage (including HTML5 video, CSS animations, HTML5 Canvas animations, SVG SMIL animation and animated GIFs) with one pause button on a page that respects the operating system “prefers reduced motion” settings.

All the software being used in this presentation is mostly open-source and/or free, with only a few low-cost solutions thrown into the mix. We will do an overview a combination of new modern software (including AI solutions) along with older, battle tested computer packages.

Practical Skills

  • We will discuss the requirements that make audio, video and web animations accessible and the challenges of implementing them.
  • We will discuss low-cost/no-cost solutions that can fix existing content as well as ensuring new content is made accessible from the beginning.
  • You will learn how to use each of the solutions described, along with a breakdown of how easy each solution is to use, and the learning curve involved.