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Posted by Stephen Gray on Friday 23 October 2009 at 10:50am
Tags: accessibility | news | video

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‘Accessibility’ applies to us all, all of the time. This is easy to say, but when we battle to watch a Flash movie online, only to find that we don’t have the correct plug-in or the admin rights to install it, it really rings true.

But of course digital audio or video needn’t always exclude people, it can be used to include as well.

Adding Closed Captions to Flash Video is the first of several how-to guides intended to get anyone started on the road to building accessibility into their digital media collections.

The document is intentionally hands-on and this will also be true of all the accessibility papers we have planned. The idea is not to provide wide-ranging advice (for this you could visit our sister service JISC TechDis) but to provide all the information needed to get started immediately.

One of the issues which came up during the researching of this document was that there are now literally dozens of ways to archive similar results. Adding Closed Captions to Flash Video assumes that users have already secured access to Adobe Creative Suite (CS) in order to create .flv files and so Adobe CS tools are used, but there are several excellent alternative opensource tools available.

If there are other advice documents you’d like to see which involve widening accessibility through digital media, or accessibility-related software tools you particularly like, please let us know.

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