Auditory difficulties

Overview of the challenge

When multimedia e-learning resources contain spoken or other audio information (such as on-or off-screen sound effects, or background music) that is important to understanding the resource, access barriers are highly likely be encountered by anyone who can't hear the soundtrack. A lack of an interpretation of spoken content into a sign language is likely to further reduce accessibility for people who cannot hear the audio and who have difficulty reading text.

Meeting the challenge

Meeting this challenge, when using multimedia:

Make a text transcript available to provide a textual account of all the resource's spoken and important non-spoken information.

Even better, provide 'real-time' text equivalents for all spoken and important non-spoken information through synchronised captions.

Use multimedia - video or animation - to provide real time translation into sign language such as BSL for the resource's spoken content.