Skills for Access

Why this is important

Providing text-equivalents enables media that contains spoken or other audio information (on-or off-screen sound effects, or background music) important to understanding the media's content to be accessible to anyone who has difficulty hearing, or is unable to hear, the media soundtrack. Any Director/Shockwave content with spoken or non-spoken audio important to its understanding may cause problems unless the audio information is provided in another way.

General Principles

The flexibility of Director in creating multimedia resources offers a number of options for providing alternatives to audio content. For example, sound alerts may be replicated by visual cues within the movie, while spoken information provided as a soundtrack can be replicated by the provision of on-screen text. For more complex Director movies, captions can be created as part of Director's Accessibility Behaviours.

NB: We have provided general advice on captioning in a separate How To: Provide text equivalents for audio - general advice on captions.

Before you continue

The advice on this page helps you avoid introducing a specific accessibility barrier, but it's not a magic formula. To avoid attempting to follow a technical solution that is not appropriate to the resource and its intended purpose, you need to know the context in which the multimedia resource is being used:

1. The purpose or aim of the multimedia resource in question, and whether it is being used to supplement another resource in the learning environment, or whether its use is required by students.
2. The target audience, their knowledge and expectations, and the type of browsing and assistive technology that they may be using.
3. Whether the information and experiences provided by the multimedia technology are already available in an equivalent, alternative form.

For more background on this approach, see our Guide to the use of multimedia in accessible e-learning.

Technique Details

The exact steps required to ensure that audio information in your Director movie has an appropriate textual equivalent depend on the nature of the movie and the audio information. Would your movie be best served by providing captions? Or is the nature of the audio content more suited to other visual or textual equivalents?

If you choose to add captions, this can be achieved in Director using the Accessibility Captioning behaviour and the Accessibility Sync Captioning behaviour. The first behaviour allows you to create a text sprite to display captions on the movie stage, and the second allows you to specify the timing of each caption to be displayed in a particular scene.

Director also provides a way of toggling captions on and off with the Accessibility Speak Enable/Disable behavior which can be attached to a button. This gives users a highly visible option of whether or not they want to see captions, without requiring you to create two separate versions of the movie.

Macromedia's tutorial on Making Director Movies Accessible (see Related Sites) provides step-by-step instructions on adding captions to a movie.

Testing

The basic objective of testing is to answer the question "Does the Director resource still make sense when sound is not available?" You can test how effective your solution is by turning off your speakers!

It would also, of course, be beneficial obtaining feedback from end users, particularly people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Remember that they are likely to be unfamiliar with the resource so will not be able to judge whether the text-alternatives you provide are a true reflection of the audio content of the Director resource.