Viostream includes a number of features designed to improve accessibility. You can choose to use only some features, or enable the full suite and achieve WCAG 2.0 compliance.
This guide will step you through the different accessibility features available for Media assets in Viostream.
Closed Captions
Closed Captions are a text file most commonly containing dialogue that syncs with a Media Asset. To use closed Captions in Viostream, you can either create and upload your own files, or order Captions via Viostream.
Automated Captions
Viostream uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to automatically create captions for all videos uploaded to the system. This allows you to have a quick, seamless way to get your videos online whilst being accessible for all viewers.
These automatic Captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the Captions may vary. Automated Captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise. You should always review automatic captions and edit any parts that haven’t been properly transcribed.
Viostream has a fantastic, easy to use Caption editing tool, which allows you to preview your Captions (whether our ASR file or manually uploaded yourself) and perform any edits as needed.
Creating a Closed Caption file
If you wish to create or edit your own Closed Captions file, you can do so using a text editor such as Notepad++ or VS Code.
Note: word processing software such as MS Word is not suitable for creating caption files.
Viostream supports Captions formatted in accordance with the WebVTT standard. A WebVTT file in general consists of a sequence of text segments associated with a time-interval, called a cue.
A sample WebVTT file is shown below. Each cue consists of a start time, a finish time and the text to display.
WEBVTT
00:00.000 --> 00:03.000
This is the first caption
00:03.000 --> 00:08.000
Captions can be
multi-line
00:08.000 --> 00:15.000
However, the player will automatically insert line-breaks where required, therefore manual line breaks are not recommended
Be sure to save your files with a .vtt extension so that you can upload them to Viostream.
Uploading a Closed Caption file
- From the Library, locate the Media Asset you wish to add Captions to and click on its Title
- Click the Accessibility tab
- Click the Upload a Caption button
- Select your file and click Open
Supported file extensions are srt and vtt.
Transcripts
A Transcript is a downloadable text document that can be attached to a Media Asset. You can attach as many Transcripts as you like to a single asset, and they will all be listed in the download section when enabled.
Uploading a Transcript
- From the Library, locate the Media Asset you wish to add Transcripts to and click on its Title
- Click the Accessibility tab
- Click the Upload a Transcript button
- Select your file and click Open
Supported file extensions are html, htm,pdf,txt,rtf,doc and docx.
Audio Descriptions
An audio description is an additional audio track designed for visually impaired viewers, which describes the video content. In order to use audio descriptions, you must upload a file that contains an additional audio description track.
- From the Library, locate the Media Asset you wish to update and click on its Title
- Click the Accessibility tab
- Under the Audio Tracks section, type in the new name(s) for your audio tracks
- Click Save
