Audio & Video
Media content should have alternative ways to access the content for those with disabilities. This includes providing a transcript for audio and video content, providing text descriptions of any visuals within a video, and providing text descriptions for any images that are conveying extra information not included in the surrounding text content.
Audio
With media content such as podcasts or voice recordings, transcripts must be provided for hearing impaired users to allow the content to be accessible. The only exception to this rule is if the content being provided in the voice recording or podcast is already written out on your page. If the podcast or voice recording is providing unique information, then you must include a transcript.
Transcripts aren’t just for hearing impaired users. Depending on a person’s learning style, they may just prefer to read content rather than have to listen to it. Including a transcript for your audio content ensures that the reader can learn exactly the way they feel most comfortable with.
About Transcription Software
There exists software that will automatically generate captions for audio and video content (Some examples are Rev.com, Transcribe, and Trint). You can use this software to generate a baseline for your transcript, but this should NEVER be the final transcript. The technology for perfect transcribing does not exist (yet), so these kinds of software often make mistakes when transcribing content. After creating a transcript with one of these programs, you MUST edit the transcript to ensure that everything was transcribed correctly. If even a couple of words or sentences are mistranscribed, the whole overall meaning of your content could be lost.
Video
Video content is a bit more complicated. If the video contains sound, the video must provide captions and/or a transcript for hearing impaired users. In addition, if the video contains any visuals that are conveying additional information (such as a graph), text descriptions of those visuals must be provided for visually impaired users. This is only needed if the visual within the video has not been described by voice or with captions.
If a video contains sound, but the sound isn’t important, inform the reader of this before the video content with something such as “This video is not captioned because the audio content is just background music”. This ensures hearing impaired users that they are not missing any audio content from the video.