Create Accessible Podcast And iTunes U Content

By Ricky Buchanan • November 23, 2009

The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH has written guidelines for content providers who would like to create iTunes U media which is accessible for those people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired.

Step-by-step documentation is provided on creating fully accessible media, including:

Closed captions and audio descriptions that the user can turn on or off as needed.
Open subtitles and descriptions that are available to everyone watching or listening.
Closed subtitles for adding multiple language tracks to video files.
Accessibile PDFs.

The guidelines are available in PDF format, accompanied by video and audio clips illustrating the various accessibility features.

Note: The paragraph below is no longer accurate, as I’m happy to say the authors of the guidelines worked with me to find and remedy the cause of this inaccessibility. The guidelines are themselves fully accessible now.

In an unfortunate irony, the guidelines themselves appear not to be fully accessible - the PDF which is available seems not to always expose the letter “i” to the accessibility software, leading to quotes like the following being passed to my accessibility software:

By taking the steps to make these media fles fully accessible, iTunes U content providers will ensure that all students and others can fully beneft from these valuable educatonal resources.

This unfortunate error aside, the guidelines are well worth reading for anybody who’s interested in making their audio or video content as accessible as possible. The guide is aimed at iTunes U users but it’s just as applicable for podcasts or almost any other person or organisation producing multimedia content.

The guidelines appear thorough and starts by explaining what captions, subtitles, and audio description are, including examples of each. It then describes how to include these in your video or audio files, with many step-by-step tutorials with screen shots showing the exact procedure needed to add captions, subtitles and audio description.

Highly recommended!

Website: NCAM Guide To Creating Accessible iTunes U Content

- Ricky Buchanan

Categories: Content producers, Deaf, Hearing Impaired, Information, Vision Impaired, VoiceOver
Tags:

About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 34 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websites she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

16 Comments For “Create Accessible Podcast And iTunes U Content”

davidn Dec 4th, 2009 at 10:54 pm

Thanks for sharing this info. this looks like a very useful document
Mary Taylor Dec 16th, 2009 at 3:24 am

Your problem with missing letter i I think is because whoever wrote the material used software that replaces fi fl ti and some other combinations with a single character called a ligature. It’s a leftover from manual typesetting when it was difficult to get a visually nice looking way to set these character combinations. I had a look and all the mistakes I found were some combination of ligature. I have seen pdfs where the complete combination was left out so that for example ‘lives’ would just be ‘ves’. Somewhere along the line this seems to have been partially corrected so at least most of the word is there.

It just shows how easy it is to make inaccessible PDFs.

Mary
Ricky Buchanan Dec 16th, 2009 at 11:30 am

@Mary: You’re 100% correct about it being a ligature problem. Apparently that’s a known problem with PDFs produced by OpenOffice. I believe the creator is trying to find a usable ligature-free font to use instead of the current font - we’ve been emailing PDFs back and forth to check how they work.
deaf Jan 4th, 2010 at 11:43 am

Thank you for the post. Yes, it is a big frustration for people with hearing loss to use iTunes - only 180 (!!!) out of thousands of videos are captioned. To say nothing about podcasts. Not just that, there’s no clear navigation link for captioned content - it can be found only via power search and only for videos (you cannot do power search for tv shows). So much for them to claim about their “accessibility” support while this population segment is under-served big time.
Round-Up: Discount Software, Accessible PDFs, Best App Ever « AccessTech News Jan 20th, 2010 at 11:11 pm

[...] wrote last year about the guidelines for creating accessible podcast and iTunes University content, put together by The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH. Unfortunately, at the time I [...]
Round-Up: Discount Software, Accessible PDFs, Best App Ever « The BAT Channel Jan 20th, 2010 at 11:12 pm

[...] wrote last year about the guidelines for creating accessible podcast and iTunes University content, put together by The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH. Unfortunately, at the time I [...]
atmacjournal Nov 23rd, 2009 at 10:38 pm

New ATMac post: Create Accessible Podcast And iTunes U Content http://bit.ly/6P4yJ7

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
bgilormini Nov 23rd, 2009 at 11:59 pm

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Sosna_John Nov 24th, 2009 at 7:12 am

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atmacjournal Nov 24th, 2009 at 7:30 am

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Independence1st Nov 24th, 2009 at 7:39 am

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delicious_feeds Nov 24th, 2009 at 8:47 am

Create Accessible Podcast And iTunes U Content | ATMac http://bit.ly/07dePoA

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strongria Nov 24th, 2009 at 9:06 am

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AbilitiesUnited Nov 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am

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This comment was originally posted on Twitter
stcaccess Dec 4th, 2009 at 1:04 am

Do you create podcasts? Are they accessible? @atmacjournal has a reminder for you: http://bit.ly/6P4yJ7 #techcomm

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
innova2 Dec 4th, 2009 at 4:05 am

RT @stcaccess Do you create podcasts? Are they accessible? @atmacjournal has a reminder for you: http://bit.ly/6P4yJ7

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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