Skills for Access

Why this is important

Graphical information presented in a Director/Shockwave movie will be inaccessible to anyone who cannot see the content of the movie, unless a text alternative is provided - in particular for anyone who is blind or visually impaired, and would normally use a screen reader to access on-screen content. Therefore Director content should be made available in audio format.

General Principles

Unlike other web technologies that incorporate graphics, Director's accessibility strategy for making graphical content accessible to people who cannot see it does not involve providing a text equivalent that can be read out by a screen reader or displayed by a text-only browser. Instead, Director provides a way of speech-enabling the movie and its component objects, removing the need for a user to have their own text-to-speech solution.

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

For a discussion of Director's text-to-speech solution and how it may be implemented, see How to enable audio output of on-screen text - in Director/Shockwave.

Testing

For an end user to be able to hear the speech output provided, the computer running the Director movie must have the operating system's text-to-speech interface. For Windows, this should be Speech API 4 or 5. Movies can test whether or not a user's computer has text-to-speech enabled, and if not, the move should provide instructions to help a user install this feature.

It's obviously essential that you listen to the movie (turn the monitor off!) to establish whether the content spoken for each movie component is indeed appropriate and logical in the context of the movie, and helps preserve the experience provided by the movie. As ever, seeking feedback from blind and visually impaired users and anyone else who will be relying on the speech output would also be worthwhile.