Opera at SXSW 2008

MAGpie and Accessible Video

By Jim Brown. Sunday, 9. March 2008, 21:57:56

As John said, Casino El Camino was awesome...but now, it's back to business. I grabbed some coffee so I could be nice and sharp for the afternoon panels. My first panel was a "core conversation" (basically a small roundtable) about accessible video.

At the Computer Writing and Research Lab (where John and I work), we are constantly talking about Web accessibility issues. In fact, John Slatin, co-author of the book Maximum Accessibility, is a professor in our department. One thing the CWRL has struggled with over the past couple of years is video and accessibility. When our students and instructors embed videos, we aren’t exactly sure how to deal with it. Do we ask these folks to insert captions for every video they embed? Is this realistic?

I stopped by the core conversation about video and web accessibility, and learned about a tool called MAGpie. I’m not sure if this tool is widely known, but I think I’ll be taking it back to the CWRL with me. It still seems difficult to provide captions for every embedded video, but this is a tool that allows us to at least think about accessible video on our websites.