Adding an Audio Description Track to a Video

Hi Agnieska,

I appreciate that your post is about 3 months old. Did you manage to do it? if so, how? I'm also trying to implement it. The way I can see it working would be to

• add 2 separate videos (video1 with the normal track and video2 with the Audio description). 
• Place video2 behind video1 so that if people were to click on the video they can only click on video1, 
• In the 'Tab order' or using the 'accessibility' option in the context menu in the timeline, I'd remove video1 so that if people use tab, they would go straight to video2 and play it =

However this option mean having 2 videos, adding more mb to the scorm file. You also need to customise extra trigger because video2 would be behind video 1 so it will need to come at the forefront when playing..... unless (I'm thinking out loud here), we don't need another video, but just an audio track.

Thoughts and ideas are welcome

Well Articulate says this behavior is supported in it's documentation.  So it either is supported or it isn't.  Either way, this needs an answer. 

You'll see that in the VPAT, WCAG 1.2.3 is supported. To meet this criterion, we recommend giving learners a separate audio track or a detailed text-based alternative that describes video content that can’t be heard in the audio, such as chyrons, character actions, and scene changes.

You can review the criterion to see suggested techniques.

Lauren in reviewing this information it states that it supports it but not what method to use. Can you expand on this?

Hi, Derek.

I hope some of our community members who have worked with audio descriptions can chime in with their suggestions here, but it's usually up to the author which method they want to use. 

Chris suggested using two videos, and Lauren mentioned using a separate audio track (you can use a button with a trigger to "play media when the user clicks") or alternative text. 

I hope this helps!

So - it might work to build two buttons. One would play the video with the standard narration. The second one would have triggers to play the video, plus an additional audio track that includes descriptions of video. Because of the timing, it may be necessary to include triggers to pause and restart the video at specific places in the timeline to allow time for the description of the video to take place. Does this sound about right? I'm going to have to try it...

What about setting a variable and asking the user if they need audio descriptions at the beginning of the course? (Or you could do it with buttons on the page.) Slides with videos would check the variable and if it was "yes" it would show the video with the audio description track and its controls, and if it was no, it would show the video without the audio description track. Or you could make play buttons on the slide that would play one video or the other based on a radio button choice (e.g., What video would you like to play?). 

Any updates on this? I'm in the same boat.

I've still never done it, but I've thought about it. I would give the learner a button to set a global variable to turn it on or off. When on, triggers would pause the video at the designated cue point until the descriptive audio has played, upon which another trigger would resume the video.