Reflection Questions and Exercises

If you are already employed in scholarly communication, survey the digital content you manage and take note of the media materials. Do these items have accessibility issues? If so, what resources are at your disposal to address these issues? If you are not employed at an institution, pick an academic library you’re familiar with and check their digital collections with these questions in mind.

Pick a collection of media materials that need remediation work. Sketch out a plan for doing this work that takes into account the quantity of media, software, tools, and staff support available to assist you. Based on your estimates, would it be better to handle your project within your library/university or outsource?

Do some research to learn about outsourcing options for captioning work. For instance, review the list of captioning service vendors listed by DCMP. Check into the costs for one or two vendors and consider how you might fund your project. Have a look at 3PlayMedia’s “5 Ways to Pay for Captioning with Grants and Funding.” Do any of these options fit your needs at your institution?

Look up a video on YouTube like this Coco trailer and think about how you would write the captions and/or audio description. How would you describe the sounds and images in these clips to communicate the overall mood? How do sounds function in the video to communicate particular ideas?

Navigate to the Poet Training Tool and have a look at some of the tips the project provides for describing different types of images. Click on “Practice” and try your hand at describing an image. What questions came up for you while doing this exercise? If you chose an image of a person/people, did you have any trouble selecting language that describes “appearance” without presuming “identity”? What did this experience teach you about writing alt text generally?