Audio Description

And that brings us to audio descriptions. Now, audio descriptions are interesting because this is basically an audio track that narrates visual information.

And that addresses the need of blind and low vision folks to know what's going on on the screen.

I have an example here. And basically what this does is that it uses natural pauses in the video to add narration to the video.

And that is super clever and it takes a lot of skills to do that.

Much easier is it if you just leave enough space for the audio description.

So if you put your storyboard together, you plan for the audio description and then you can have an audio described version and a non audio described version.

But you have to plan for it. There's no way around that.

Web Accessibility Perspectives

Colours with good contrast

Signs with directions are shown.

A woman is walking happily down the street.

There's something about great design that allows it to go practically unnoticed.

But it doesn't take much to make things confusing and frustrating.

Choosing colours with poor contrast makes navigating, reading and interacting a real pain.

The signs change to have poor contrast. The woman now looks confused. She looks at a navigation app on her phone.

Good design means sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours. That's not just text and images, but links, icons and buttons.

The app has a button with low contrast that changes to become clear.

If it's important enough to be seen, then it needs to be clear.

And this is essential for people with low contrast sensitivity, which becomes more common as we age.

An older man on a sofa is looking at a tablet. He goes to read a message on his mobile phone.

With good colours, websites and applications can be easier to use in more situations, like in different lighting conditions.

Sun glares on the phone, but the text is still readable.

Web accessibility: essential for some, useful for all.

The woman from earlier arrives at her destination using the mobile app.

Visit w3.org/wai/perspectives for more information on colors with good contrast.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Copyright 2016.

So this is a typical example. Whenever there's a narration pause,

So the male sounding voice in this example did like the normal narration that you have in any video.

And then the female sounding voice did the audio description and described what's going on on the screen.

So this typical audio description way.

If you want to see this also in practice, as I said, streaming services are extremely good with accessibility.

If you have Disney+, look at things like Daredevil.

If you have Apple TV+, See is a good example where it's about a society of blind people, which is interesting.

only seen the first series, so I can't comment on how good it is. But yeah, there are a lot of good

examples where you can switch on captions, closed captions, or audio descriptions and get that

information.