Helping Organizations Meet Accessibility Compliance
Company: Inclusive Media and Design
Funder: Broadcasting Accessibility Fund
Mohawk's accessibility researchers, along with students in the Accessible Media Production Program, provide expertise to help industry solve their digital accessibility challenges, combining accessibility and usability knowledge to deliver solutions that help organizations to meet their accessibility (AODA/WCAG) requirements. Each project is approached with an accessible and evidence-based research lens looking at an industry problem, proposing a solution, and then working on applying their knowledge to address the solution.
Project Summary
Mohawk College Research Team: Jennifer Jahnke, Andrea Jelic, Colin Taylor, Tracey Kadish
Inclusive Media and Design Project Team: Rob Harvie, Charles Silverman, Antonio Gamba-Bari
The original CapScribe digital video captioning and description suite was limited in platform and operating system compatibility. With support from the Canadian Broadcasting Accessibility Fund, Mohawk College's Accessible Media Production program partnered with Inclusive Media and Design in breathing new life into CapScribe, a 20 year old tool. Cross-platform and more accessible, CapScribe 2 extends its userbase, with a focus on supporting academic institutions who want to provide equal access to educational content that is increasingly online video-based.
Context
Video accessibility practices such as captioning are far too frequently relegated to automation – or services that rely upon automation and downplay human contextualizing and proofing. CapScribe 2 helps make captioning more efficient. Building on decades of improvements to its predecessor, the revision provides a streamlined, more elegant experience.
About Inclusive Media and Design
Inclusive is a Toronto-based innovation company focused on advancing the accessibility of digital media for people with disabilities; or, for “us all”. It offers consulting and technical services of Web Accessibility Audits and Remediation Support, Web video captioning, sign language, audio description and other media augmentation.
Worldwide Support of Digital Media Accessibility
December 3rd is the UN’s Designated Day for Access
This day is annually known as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The theme this year is “Building Back Better: toward a disability-inclusive, accessible and sustainable post COVID-19 World”.
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act
Ontario has committed to an accessible province for its constituents by 2025. As part of this effort, large organizations and businesses are required to have their web content accessible by January 1st, 2021.
W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The World Wide Web Consortium has provided guidelines to which regional governments refer to in ensuring that the Web can be used by everyone. Accurate captioning is one criterion specified at the most basic of levels.
Intuitive Interface and Flow
CapScribe 2 is an easy-to-use Macintosh and Windows editor that lets users caption and describe video for fuller comprehension by more people. The current beta version supports captioning workflow, with the next release adding support for video description.
Files and Formats
CapScribe 2 supports caption formats that are compatible with a variety of platforms, browsers, and video players. CapScribe 2 generates a choice of ready-to-deploy web video player code and customizable transcripts, including caption and description integration.
Legislative Compliance
CapScribe 2 output lets users’ organizations meet compliance with provincial, state and national laws that require the development of captions for web-deployed video content. Providing accurate, well-formed captions brings significant benefits for everyone.