After your event: Captioning and Audio Describing Videos

Toolkit Table of Contents

To ensure the videos you produce at UCSF are accessible, they must have accurate captions, this also includes all publicly available postings on UCSF websites whether or not there is a fee charged to access the information.

Audio Description (AD) may also be required when videos are being shared publicly and contain important visual information that cannot be accessed by a person who is blind or has low vision. Professional third-party captioning and audio description vendors are excellent resources for providing low-cost and high-quality captioning and audio descriptions.

Note: While auto-captioning tools have made progress in ensuring accuracy, they are not considered to meet the full accessibility standards.


Non-exhaustive list of vendors

Auto-generated captioning
  • Captions generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not generally considered as accurate as professional captions created by human captioners.
  • To ensure captions meet UCSF accuracy standards, any captions produced with AI will need to be edited before the video is posted online.
  • There are several platforms where you can add/edit captions including YouTube, Microsoft Stream, and Vimeo. You can then make corrections with a caption-editing tool (e.g., Amara) and embed the captions within your video.
Audio Description
  • Audio Description (AD) provides blind and low vision users with a description of the visual content contained in videos. It describes the relevant visual information of a video in an audio format, so that users with visual disabilities can access what sighted users see in that video.
  • Example: Video with audio description

When to include audio description

  • Audio description is required when important information is visually shown on the screen that cannot be seen by people who are blind or have low vision.
  • For example:
    • An object, person, landscape, or action is shown on the screen that is not referred to verbally but has importance to the information being conveyed.
  • Learn more: 

Options for adding audio descriptions to your videos:

  • Use a third-party vendor to create audio descriptions. Below is a non-exhaustive list of possible vendors:
    • 3PlayMedia - low-cost option for audio description.
    • YouDescribe is a free web-based tool that allows anyone to record audio descriptions of YouTube videos.

Describing Videos

The easiest and low-cost method is to teach presenters how to verbally describe the visual content in their presentations. If presenters describe the visual content, the required amount of audio description can be reduced or even eliminated.

Example:

  • A video includes a diagram, chart, or graph.
  • Instead of saying "You can see the details in this diagram," the presenter can say "This slide shows a Venn diagram with four circles that overlap in the center. Circle 1 shows x, circle 2 shows x, circle 3 shows x, and the fourth circle shows x."
  • Or "A man enters, looks at the water, and quickly exits."