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Given the popularity of online video, it makes sense that there are a wide variety of tools and organizations that focus on making video content accessible. This chapter is not intended as a comprehensive list of all available tools in this space, nor are the tools featured necessarily the best tools for each situation. Rather, this chapter is intended to provide examples of some of the popular tools used to make videos accessible and the most common workflows that institutions have developed to improve video accessibility. The list also offers an overview of the types of functions and features that are generally supported by existing tools.
In-House Video Creation
For institutions interested in creating captions, transcripts, or audio descriptions in-house, there are several tools that can support this process. They offer various advantages and disadvantages, but all will allow for the creation of accessibility features by individuals with varying degrees of technical skills at the institution itself.
CADET (Caption and Description Editing Tool)—The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH has been a leader in media accessibility since its founding in the early 1990s. CADET is its latest tool for captioning and audio describing online media. It is a free, browser-based tool, can be used offline, and allows users to generate both caption files in multiple formats and scripts for audio descriptions. CADET was designed in a manner that protects privacy, since it “runs locally in any Web browser, so users do not need to upload private videos or proprietary content to servers or video-hosting sites in order to create captions.”1 It supports multiple types of use, including transcribing audio within the platform, importing files for editing, adding time stamps, and creating an audio description script with the proper time stamps built into it. The end product can be exported in a range of file types, including WebVTT, SRT, and plain text. In addition, CADET offers extensive documentation, tutorials, and a user group, which make it relatively easy to learn to use the platform and to offer feedback that can impact its future.
YouDescribe—This free tool, developed by the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, offers a way for anyone to add audio descriptions to existing YouTube videos regardless of whether they are the...