From cat videos to online learning, video is increasingly dominating our online experiences. This makes it more important than ever for content creators to ensure that their videos can be enjoyed by the largest possible audience—including people with disabilities.
Captioning and audio descriptions are two important tools to make videos more accessible. Captions present audio content as text, making video more accessible to people who deaf or hard-of-hearing, people watching a video in a non-native language, or anyone watching in a noisy room. Captions can also help with search engine optimization. Audio descriptions are narrations of important visual information such as scene changes and facial expressions, making video more accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.
A growing set of online tools are making it easier than ever to incorporate captions or audio descriptions into your videos. One available captioning tool is CADET (Caption and Description Editing Tool), a free, downloadable caption-authoring software that enables anyone to produce high-quality caption files that are compatible with any media player that supports the display of captions. CADET can also be used to generate audio-description scripts.
CADET was developed by the National Center for Accessible Media at the WGBH Educational Foundation with funding from ACL’s National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR). Watch CADET in action below.