The 3Play Way: Audio Description [TRANSCRIPT]
KELLY MAHONEY: Thank you, everyone, for joining us for today’s session on “The 3Play Way, Audio Description.” My name is Kelly Mahoney and I’m going to be moderating today. I am 3Play’s Partner Marketing Specialist. I am a white woman with long red-brown hair in a clip today. I’m wearing a brown knit sweater.
I’ll just give you a brief outline of the agenda for today. We’ll give you an overview of audio description just to make sure that we’re all on the same page about the basics, the laws, et cetera. Then, we’ll dive into how 3Play provides audio description. We’ll forecast a little bit of the challenges and the trends that we’ve seen in the industry. And then, we’ll talk about how we are truly a partner in accessibility. And any remaining time will be devoted to Q&A.
All right. And the last thing I have before we pass things off to our speaker for today is a poll. I just want to see how familiar our audience is with audio description. So you should see that poll pop up on your screen here soon. We want to know, are you currently adding audio description to your video content? The options here are yes, no, or I’m not sure.
If for any reason you can’t access the poll function, please feel free to participate via chat. All right, we’re getting lots of responses right out of the gate here. Highly engaged audience. I appreciate that, you guys. This is great.
I think we can go ahead and close the poll. To my delight, the majority of you are using audio description right now. About 62% of people said yes, 26% said no, and 11% said I’m not sure. Well, hopefully if you’re not sure, after today you’ll have a little bit of a clearer picture on audio description. So to set us up for that, I’m going to pass things off to our speaker for today, Erik Ducker. Oops.
ERIK DUCKER: Hi, everyone. My name is Erik. I am a white male in my early 30s. I have brown hair and brown eyes, and I have he/him pronouns. I am the Senior Director of Product Marketing here at 3Play Media.
So I get a front row seat to all of our customers’ needs, a view of the industry on everything around accessibility. And so I’m excited to be able to share some of my learnings back to this group, for those who are familiar with 3Play Media and those who are not familiar with 3Play Media.
I also have a pretty extensive background in video streaming in general, really been in the broadcast video industry for about the last 10 years. So combining both my accessibility expertise over the last two years being here at 3Play Media, along with my almost decade being in video streaming, I can provide a very unique lens of what I’ve seen in the market in terms of everything around accessible experiences.
Today, although there’s plenty of accessibility options in the market, we’re going to be really just focused on one feature today. We’re going to be talking about audio description. And so just to get us started, what is audio description? And I think the best way to understand audio description is to just listen to an example.
So I don’t want you to watch. I actually just want you to listen to an example. We’ll just play about 15 to 20 seconds. It is a very cheeky video. So you’re allowed to laugh at it once you’ve heard some of this video.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
– Text, 3Play Media presents You Guys Need Captions. Alongside a mural of colorful graffiti art, a man in a fedora and a bow tie appears.
[PHARRELL WILLIAMS “HAPPY” PARODY PLAYING]
– (SINGING) Hey, listen up to what I’m about to say.
– He glances at the mural, then faces us.
– Captions help your content so many ways.
– His–
[END PLAYBACK]
ERIK DUCKER: OK. So we’re going to spare everyone. But effectively what you’ve just listened to is an audio description track that’s overlaid on a core audio track for the video itself. And that audio description track is providing a description of the visuals that are important to understanding the experience of that video.
So they’re reading off the titles available in the video. They’re talking about the main person on the screen turning themselves. So you get an idea of the movement of people within the video so that you can have an equivalent experience of someone who can see the full video. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
– Text, 3Play Media presents You Guys Need Captions.
[END PLAYBACK]
ERIK DUCKER: We’re going to skip ahead. All right. So let’s start with the basics. You probably have heard of descriptive video or audio description. They’re basically the same thing. But that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
And it really just focuses on narrating the relevant visual information. And it can sometimes play in addition to the main audio track, or it can play alongside the main audio track or embedded within the main audio track. The primary reason why this has been developed is it’s an accommodation for blind and low-vision viewers. It allows us to paint a picture for those who can’t see the screen and enable them to engage in video content just like a sighted individual could as well.
We’ll be talking about audio description in two primary formats. There’s standard audio description, which is fitting all of these descriptions into the natural pauses of the source content. That video example that we played is a perfect example of standard audio description. We’re fitting in the description between those natural pauses of speech.
Alternatively, there’s extended audio description, which allows us to pause the actual source content as needed to make room for the descriptions as we need to. So taking a step back, how did we get here? And it can be really summed up as regulations and laws that have been there to protect people who are blind and low vision and make sure that we’re providing equal accommodation to those who are trying to view video content in our digital economy.
So many of the same laws that require closed captioning for video also require audio description. The CVAA, the 21st Century Video Accessibility Act, which we’ll cover again later today, really talks about broadcast media and the requirements for accommodations for broadcast media that’s being distributed over air. And more recently, we’re starting to see more proposals about streaming media and the expectations of providing accommodations to streaming media.
Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, despite its time frame of being enacted so many years ago, pre-internet, the law has been applied to many digital environments. So a lot of the regulations and expectations in the market are based off of the application of ADA to a public place of accommodation, which the internet has broadly been deemed as a public place of accommodation in many, many places of case law. There are other laws and regulations, both in the US and outside the US as well, that enforce and support audio description as being a required accommodation for video content.
It’s also built into the international standards for website accessibility. So the WCAG guidelines build audio description in as a recommended requirement for any passing level of certification. So whether you are achieving Level A WCAG 2.0, 2.1 Level A standards, or Level 3, audio description, or some sort of media alternative, or text alternative to the video, is required. But audio description is an acceptable accommodation for any level of the WCAG guidelines.
So what are the options? I just said audio description is pretty much required. I’m going to take a pause and say, not all videos require a separate audio description track. If you build audio description into your core video asset or your core script, you can basically create audio description embedded into the experience, and you don’t need to then produce another audio description track.
Remember, you’re just trying to describe the elements that are important for a low or blind– sorry, a blind or low-vision user. So during the production– and this is an example where we’re trying our best to describe everything that’s on the slide, read it almost verbatim, in some cases, but make sure that if you are unable to see the slides that you are getting the same experience as someone who can see the slides. So the options of creating audio descriptions start with, can you build it into your creative process during production, narrating the visuals at the time of the recording?
If that’s not possible, and that’s oftentimes not possible with cinematic content or broadcast content, that’s where you can start deciding, well, am I going to do this in house through my post-production process? And I’m going to have my own audio description scriptwriters, and then I’m going to have my own people record additional voice description and merge that in house on my side.
Alternatively, and what we’re talking about mostly today, is external production like 3Play Media, where you can outsource the audio description creation for your finished video asset with a professional description. And we’ll take care of basically all of the creation, from script writing to recording to audio mixing and delivery of that audio description track.
So you really do have optionality. And in some cases, your content and the way that you present your content is not going to require a separate audio description track. And oftentimes, especially whether you’re doing product videos or you’re doing cinematic content, you’re likely going to need a separate audio description track that overlays to the core narration or script.
So besides the legal compliance, why do we do this? Audio description is imperative to provide access for blind and low-vision users. We want to make sure that there’s flexibility. Video views can be done in eyes-free environments.
Brand. We’ve seen metric after metric explain that brands that have accessibility for brands perform better. So building inclusive design into your process, which includes audio description, is not going to go unnoticed with consumers. Consumers are going to appreciate the extra effort that you as a brand are doing to support all accommodations for all people that you’re trying to reach.
Focus. Oftentimes, audio description, these are professionals writing scripts. Their job is basically I spy. Their job is to describe what they’re seeing. And they’re able to sometimes provide additional context that you as a viewer may not even notice. So it’s not only a potential benefit– it’s not just a benefit for low-vision and blind users, but it can be an additional opportunity for a sighted individual who wants additional understanding.
So without fail, we’re always up against some challenges, though. So without reading too much between the lines, budget is always going to be an issue. This is the most common conversation that we have. It’s expensive. It’s time intensive. There’s other things that you could be doing. These are important considerations to think about.
And when you’re thinking about budgeting, and you’re thinking about the opportunity cost of doing an audio description, that is a decision that you and your brand and your company have to make, the weighs– the pros and cons. Alternatively, you can look at, how do you accomplish this? Well, some of your video content, how do we change our production style to make it so that audio description isn’t required because we’re doing the description in the creative process?
And some videos are just going to need to do audio description. And that’s where you can work with a vendor like 3Play Media to help streamline that budget challenge and keep a very consistent understanding of what you’re going to spend. And there’s lots of optionality that we’re going to talk about in terms of maintaining a restricted budget that you might have.
The other thing is, you are still dealing with an additional media asset all of a sudden. You have this new audio file, or you have this new encoded video with this separate audio track. So it can complicate workflows.
But 3Play Media, and other providers that we’ll talk about, like Brightcove and Kaltura on the video streaming side, are working together to make this simpler for you. So if you’re working with the right technology partners, the complicated workflows should go away. But if you’re trying to do this with bespoke systems, it may be a challenge.
And that leads to the last piece, which we’ll talk about later again, is publishing. We’re talking about a separate media asset. Does my video player support a secondary audio track?
How am I going to organize my content management system to have two types of videos for every single content page? There are going to be challenges. And those are things that you’ll have to discuss internally with your team to find a solution that’s going to work for your process without being too burdensome.
So I’m going to pause there, one, to give me a break. But I also want to hear, how many videos have you had audio described? So the choices are going to be 0, less than 5, less than 50, less than 100, or over 100. All right, Kelly, let me know if we’re at– you can close it when you feel comfortable.
All right. So we have, which is not surprising because this should be– the people who voted last time that they have not done audio description is exactly the percentage of people that have not audio described any videos. But pretty much an even spread at that point. So about 26% of the audience has had less than 5 videos audio described, 16% less than 50, 10% less than 100. And then 11% of our audience, or about 10% of our audience, has had over 100 of their videos audio described.
So I would imagine that that 10% is usually the customers who have been in a position to really systematize audio description into their publishing workflows. And so very interesting for us to lean into, how is 3Play Media solving these problems? So let’s talk a little bit about our solution. At the end of the day, we’re mixing technology with humans to create an efficient process that allows for audio description to be created at scale consistently, reliably, and, hopefully, cost efficiently for you.
The first question to always ask yourself is, what content do I have that needs to be described? And will I be able to use synthesized speech for my voiceover? Or is it going to likely require Voice Artist Audio Description, or as we like to call it internally, VAAD? V-A-A-D, VAAD, very, very pleasant name. Synthesized speech can be very cost efficient because you’re taking a script and you’re recording a media track with synthesized speech.
It creates instantaneous turnaround, basically. So once that script is written, in a matter of minutes, that video can then be recorded and encoded and ready for you as a customer. However, there are drawbacks to synthesized speech. When you’re talking about using this for dramatic content or cinematic content, you may end up finding that the synthesized speech can contrast the tone of the content.
So maybe you’re in a sorrow moment in the video, or you’re in a very excited moment in the video. The description using synthesized speech is not necessarily going to be able to match all of those different tones. So for training content, synthesized speech is likely a very good option for both cost efficient reasons. But it’s not going to be overtly disruptive to the experience.
Whereas voice artist audio description, which is largely used in the cinematic and broadcast space, is using voice artist talent, people who are trained voice artists, who are going to record their voice, matching the tone and expectations of the scene. And that might change throughout the single video to make sure that their voice isn’t super disruptive to the content.
That being said, it is a much higher cost service because now you’re hiring an additional talent to– on top of the script writing, you’re asking an additional talent with unique skill sets to record video for you. And it can increase the time. Once again, there’s not as much automation available when you’re using humans. But we’ll talk about our process and how additional QA and quality control steps get introduced when you start using voice artist processes as well.
So once you’ve made a decision about whether you’re going to have synthesized speech or a voice artist talent recording your content, now the question is, can this description be standard or extended? Standard makes things a lot easier from a publishing standpoint because now you’re matching the existing timeline of your video asset. So your publishing mechanisms get much more simple.
All of a sudden, Brightcove, who supports audio description tracks, or Kaltura that supports audio description tracks, you can just easily upload those finished assets into those platforms. That standard audio description track is fitting description into a natural pause of the source content. So if there’s a lot of visually focused content and not a lot of speech, there’s oftentimes plenty of time to do all the description inside those moments of pause.
So marketing content, commercials, trailers, cinematic content are very common use cases. In the Hollywood industry, you are basically always going to see standard. I think there’s rare instances that you’re ever going to see an extended audio description track.
The extended audio description is a little bit more challenging from a publishing perspective, but it allows you to pause the source content as needed to make room for descriptions. So sometimes it can be a little bit more challenging to write extended audio description because you no longer have a time constraint as a writer. And so you’re now just using pure artistic interpretation, and it can sometimes be more challenging.
But it’s really important for dialogue-heavy content and content where there’s going to be a lot of things that need to be described. In this particular event, we’re trying not to need any audio description by reading the content of the slides. But if I wasn’t reading the content of the slides, we’d likely need an extended audio description.
Because guess what? I’m not pausing nearly enough to explain what is happening visually in this presentation. So lectures, presentations like this, training use cases where you’re trying to explain complex topics with complex visuals, you’re likely going to have a need for extended audio description.
So next is understanding the process. How does the sausage get made here? What makes quality description? It’s really five key characteristics. And the first is accurate.
So this is the actual audio track, accurate meaning there’s no pronunciation errors. The word selection is correct. The diction is good. The enunciation of words is good. That’s where synthesized speech is usually going to be really spot on. And then your voice artist talent is also focusing on making sure that what is being recorded is super accurate.
Equal. Equal access requires that the meaning and intention of the program must be conveyed. The scriptwriters are not writing opinions about what they’re seeing. They’re stating facts that are happening.
So we go back to that Pharrell parody video. The person is turning their body is a factual statement. There’s graffiti on the wall is a factual statement. There’s no commentary about whether they like the clothes that the person is wearing or how slow– or whether the person is turning too fast or too slow. It’s just turning and graffiti on the wall. It’s very succinct messaging.
Third is consistent. As well as voicing– the content as well as the voicing should match the style, tone, and pace of the programs. So patterns should be used for things such as announcing on-screen text and introducing new people. There’s a little less control of this in synthesized speech recordings.
But when you’re talking about a voice artist talent, those are the things that they’re paying attention to. They want to make sure that if you are only able to audioly listen to this video, they want to make it clear, are we introducing a person? Are we describing something? There should be slight changes, slight opportunities of singling of what is happening. What’s the context?
Prioritized, so content essential to the comprehension and enjoyment of the utmost importance. So what we mean by that is that you’re not describing everything on the screen. It’s not possible, especially if you have tons of cinematography behind you. You can’t describe everything. You’re describing the points that are important to understanding the content.
Our goal is to provide as an equivalent of an experience to viewing this video as if you were watching it visually. So there’s a lot of opportunities where you could describe something, but we’re going to prioritize this because this is more impactful or more important for the understanding of this particular scene that’s happening. Not everything on the screen is important to understanding what’s going on.
Finally, appropriate. The intended audience. Think about the intended audience. Always be neutral, simple, and succinct. We’re not trying to throw in filler words in this script. We’re trying to create very succinct messaging that allows for our audience to understand what’s happening. So that’s really what the quality, that’s what the output is going to end up looking like.
So how does 3Play Media do this? So it’s very simple from the customer’s perspective because this is all being automated for you. But effectively, you need to give us a file. You give us a file, and our first step is transcribing that file.
We need a timed transcript so that we can then use that timed transcript to figure out, where specifically are we going to place descriptions? How long do we have for that description? So we’re building this transcription. And this needs to be very perfect. It’s very important to have the timings very accurate because the last thing you want is that description to overlap with existing audio. That’s going to be very confusing.
So once you’ve had that transcript created, the next is writing the transcript. This is where 3Play Media’s trained audio description writers come in. And they’ll know if they are doing a standard description at this point or extended description. 3Play Media allows you to let us choose for you if you have flexibility, or you can preselect a standard or extended audio description.
We’re going to adhere to established global guidelines based off of associations that are really focused on audio description. So we’re not making things up from scratch. We’re using existing guidelines. We’re happy to share those separately with you if you do want to see what guidelines that create the 3Play Media guidelines.
But the script writing is not just, I’m going to go write a script and be done. The script writing is iterative. It’s looking at the scene, making your first edit, making your first script for that particular scene, and then playing it back with synthesized speech to see if it fits. If it doesn’t fit, then you go edit. If it does fit and it’s perfect, you move on.
And so you continuously are building this script out throughout the video. And you’re constantly iterating, making sure that it’s going to fit. So it’s not just writing a script and being done. It’s making sure that the final output, as best as you can during the editing process, works for the content.
Once that script is done, there’s two paths at this point. If you’re using synthesized speech, that’s going to get automated into a recording. We’re going to record that asset with synthesized speech. And we’re going to mix that audio asset either back into the core video.
And we can deliver a fully encoded video with this new audio track that is combining both the original audio and the description. Or we’re going to deliver– and/or we can deliver the separate MP3 or WAV file back to you. And that will just be our description track. And then that’s done for synthesized.
If you’re going to go work with a voice artist, it’s a little bit different. You’re going to then send it to our voice artist department, which is actually going to have additional quality control because the human voice artist is going to be a little bit different paced than synthesized speech all the time.
So that voice artist is going to work with our voice writing department and make sure that the script that was written through our script writing department is actually going to work for their voice recording. So there’s going to be continuous– some additional edits that are made to make sure that the highest quality is achieved for the voice writing for the audio description.
We’ll mix all of that audio together. Just like we said earlier, we’ll mix all that audio with our mixing department, and then that will be then available for you to download through our platform. And in some cases, we’ll talk about that in a second, we have integrations.
So this process can be fully automated. So if we move to– if you have audio description needs at scale– Kelly, if you want to move forward one slide. If we have audio description needs at scale, we integrate with a lot of your video platforms that use you use today, so Brightcove and Kaltura, for example. If you have all your configurations preselected in 3Play, now you can order all of your audio description videos from Brightcove or from Kaltura with a single click.
And so you can automate that process, and all of a sudden, you have that audio track already ready to go in Brightcove, and you don’t have to do anything else. So we’re really trying to take the pain points that we see in audio description and make them go away. That’s ultimately our goal.
Alternatively to the integrations that we provide, there’s a lot of ways that you can publish audio description. You can upload that audio description track. And that can be– as I said, can be a separate video file. It could be a separate audio file. Just depends on your needs and how your digital experience is set up.
You can have that video be hosted separately from your primary video. You can share that AD track directly just as an alternative track to play back on your website. Or you can use something like the 3Play Media Access Player or 3Play Media Plugin, which actually just wraps around your existing player, like Brightcove or YouTube, and we’ll play back the audio description track intelligently around the source content.
So moving to just wrap up a little bit here, I want to just highlight a couple challenges and trends. And I’ve given a little bit of breadcrumbs around the main challenge that we see in this space. And I think it’s been positive, though, overall. Video player capabilities are not all equal.
And so it’s really important that when you’re thinking about who you partner with for your video streaming service, do they check the boxes for great audio description playback? Players like Kaltura and Brightcove are doing a great job here. Kaltura actually most recently has supported extended audio description natively in their player when you order through them, which is actually a 3Play service behind the scenes. That video player capability, be careful about that because it will change how you can publish this content.
3Play Media acknowledges this. And so we do have two options for you to wrap around your existing video players. And we have two different options. We have Access Player, which is an in-beta product that, as you can see to the right here, there’s a video player that’s wrapped around with 3Play Media technology that has an interactive transcript that highlights the transcript below the player. But also, on the top right corner, there’s an AD button that you can toggle on and off. And that will play back the audio description track alongside the video.
But the Access Player is basically a fully accessible media player enhancing your media accessibility capabilities, as I mentioned, audio description, interactive transcript, searchable, time synced. A lot of our customers have been using the legacy version of this experience called the 3Play Plugin. I think we have hundreds of customers using that. And that’s been widely available for many years.
So the last piece is a trend that we’re seeing. In our State of Captioning Survey at the beginning of the year, we had 43% of our respondents indicate that they were going to have an increase in audio description needs within the next year. And I think this is really a reflection of the regulations that are happening, starting to evolve to not just encompass captioning but audio description.
So I mentioned this at the very beginning. The CVAA, there’s basically a new version of that called the CVTA, Communications Video and Technology Accessibility Act, which is introducing additional requirements around audio description being enforced not just for broadcast content but for internet streaming content. And this is obviously more for when video is the product, the actual entertainment sector of the business. This is not necessarily tied directly to the education institutions and corporations.
But audio description is becoming more commonplace. And we’re seeing it in market where pretty much all of the requirements that our customers are coming to us in that broadcast space are saying, we need audio description captioning for all of our video content. So this trend is going to continue.
We’re excited to partner with you as customers or future customers to support your audio description needs, whether they’re automated at a high volume, like an e-commerce business, or more bespoke in a creative environment in, say, the cinematic industry. So I’m going to leave off with one more poll and ask our own survey here, which is, do you expect your audio description needs to change next year in 2024?
And our options are no, it will remain the same; yes, we plan to audio describe more content; yes, we plan to audio describe less content; or fourth and final, but not least, I’m just not sure.
All right. So it looks like just 10% of our audience said it’s going to probably remain the same. And about 60% have indicated that it will likely increase. No one said they’re going to describe less. So if that’s any indication to the audience here, we’re not seeing this need go away.
And so we’re very open to partnering with you to better understand how we can support your needs for any budget. So I’m going to hand it back to Kelly to wrap us up and then lead us into the Q&A Section. Thank you.
KELLY MAHONEY: Hi. Thanks, Erik. Great job. I’m happy to wrap this up here. So I’m just going to tie a nice little bow around everything that we just heard. I think these would be the headlines here. So we’d like you to take home the fact that accessibility includes audio description.
Not only are you providing an equitable experience for those that require accommodation, you’re providing a flexible experience for those who just prefer to consume media in a different way. And with that being said, audio description is an art form. Not all descriptions are created equal. There’s a lot of nuance here, and we recognize that that can be hard to navigate.
But more than anything, 3Play is here to be your partner in accessibility. We know all the complicated stuff so that we can weed through it for you and find out what would be best for your particular use case. We are trusted by over 10,000 customers.
I have some logos here on the screen. Across corporate media and entertainment, we have names like Sephora, Kaltura, which you’ve heard about throughout this presentation, Crown Media, the National Academy of TV Arts & Sciences, Oracle University, and the Smithsonian. And then in education, too, we work with universities like UC-Boulder, Portland State University, UChicago Medicine, and Rutgers.
And as an additional testimony, this is a quote from Tyler Shepard of the University of Washington, who is himself a blind user. And he says, as a blind user who works in the education field, he declares 3Play’s audio description as a game changer for equal access. So this quote just really encourages us to think about the user experience. You’re not only doing this because it’s great for your content, but it really is about the end user and making things accessible to everyone.
This is just a wrap-up slide, the pillars of 3Play. We give you peace of mind. That is our goal as a company. That’s all that we aim to do. We provide out-of-the-box legal compliance with the rules and regulations you heard about in this presentation, the CVAA, the ADA, Section 504, 508, and WCAG.
We provide flexible billing. We know that, especially within higher ed institutions and maybe some corporate organizations, there are some complications when it comes to departments, et cetera, and how things work. But we’ve got you there.
We offer five-star technical support. So we’re always here if you have any issues. One centralized platform gives you access to audio description and more. There are very easy paths to upgrades if you require different services as your brand evolves. And we’re built to scale. So as you evolve, we’ll go with you.
That’s about all for me, finally. We’ll get into the Q&A. We have seen some good questions come in. So I’m just going to stop sharing my screen here so that I can pull those up.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, I would like to start with this question that came through [INAUDIBLE] quick.
KELLY MAHONEY: Go ahead.
ERIK DUCKER: And then we can go to the Q&A function. But the question was, are you developing ways to leverage AI to create context-correct audio description? And this is a question I probably get every other week, if not more often.
It is something that we’ve been very much looking closely at and testing some early-stage concepts. At the moment, we’ve deemed that we’re quite far away from a technology perspective in the market that’s going to help us here.
Similar to closed captioning, we use AI to help expedite our editing process. And that’s been an immense help in making things more efficient and allowing us to turn around caption files very quickly back to our customers. With audio description, we don’t have any of that first-pass enabled script writing with AI today.
Probably the two number-one reasons why it’s a challenge is, one, timing. How do you create the right amount of time within content? And then, two, it’s really that prioritization process. We’ve not found that AI is really good at prioritizing what’s important because that context is very human at the core.
And so we’re hopeful to find ways in which we can leverage AI to decrease our time to create AD and pass those savings on to customers. But at this moment, we’ve not found compelling evidence that we’re quite there yet.
KELLY MAHONEY: That was a great start. Thank you very much. I am seeing some questions that are specific to platforms. So someone asks here– we’ve mentioned Kaltura and Brightcove a couple of times.
They’re curious about Panopto support for our audio description features. I know off the top of my head that audio description is supported within Panopto in that you can upload an additional file. Erik, do you have any more color you can add to the technical aspects of that?
ERIK DUCKER: I don’t. I would have to do some additional research on the Panopto platform specifically. But we can follow up with you if you wanted to just drop an email to me or one of us. I think our emails will be back– I’ll just drop my email in the chat here, or someone already did, so good.
KELLY MAHONEY: Great. We’ve got another one about YouTube here. Can you send only a YouTube URL and get audio description along with the transcript back? Does that work with the YouTube integration?
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah. So with YouTube, we just need a publicly accessible video. And ideally you have some rights to it. And we’re able to ingest that content from YouTube and then provide the transcript and the audio description track back.
KELLY MAHONEY: Great. Next question we have here, someone works in higher ed in engineering, which requires– they have much more technical video lectures, as you might be able to imagine. So how do we typically handle audio description for subject matter like that that requires a little bit of technical or maybe more advanced knowledge?
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah. So first off, we’d likely see this become an extended video– sorry, extended audio description track. The second piece is, 3Play Media works in a marketplace mechanism. And so we’re usually finding people who are matching content to subject matter experts.
Everyone on our marketplace gets to choose what they work on. And so I don’t think people are choosing engineering content without some ability to properly audio describe that content. Obviously, this can be an iterative process. So if you do test with us and find that there’s opportunities for improvement, that’s where you can work with our teams to make sure that we’re capturing what you expect as a quality output.
KELLY MAHONEY: Great. And we’ve got a couple more. I’m going to try and squeeze through them. So someone asks, can we talk about the acceptable use of linking to an audio description mixed video from the original content? Does that satisfy WCAG Level AA guidelines?
This person has heard yes and no. I can take an initial start at this. I think what we’ve seen, at least in the marketing side of things, is that is an option. I think it’s not the most equitable experience. It is taking users away from the original source content.
However, it satisfies the availability of having audio description available. So this is where we go back, as the rule of thumb is just really thinking about the end user’s experience. Ideally, you would have everything available in one place. But if that’s not possible, then still providing the accommodation elsewhere is acceptable. Erik, if you have anything else to add there, please feel free to jump in.
ERIK DUCKER: No, I think that’s spot on.
KELLY MAHONEY: But we’ve heard that question.
ERIK DUCKER: I always look at the guidelines as the check boxes, not necessarily the ideal experience. And so I think you’re definitely satisfying the requirement from a checkbox perspective. But if you are able to combine that into a singular experience for your end viewers, that’s really the optimal option.
KELLY MAHONEY: Great. I think we are out of time. That is about all that we can get to for right now. We appreciate how engaged everyone has been, though. And of course, if you want to follow up with either myself or Erik, Erik might have more knowledge to give you off the top of his head. But you can feel free to reach out to either of us.
Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Erik, for the wonderful presentation today. And we appreciate you all joining us and being so engaged. And we hope you have a great rest of your Thursday.