A web page or Word document will be the easiest documents to create with accessibility in mind, or remediate after your content is created.
In comparison, an Acrobat PDF will be very challenging to remediate! So please do not create PDFs unless there is some feature that cannot be achieved with other formats that have lighter remediation efforts.
Yes, but there does not have to be. Social media can be offset by making sure info gets out in other ways as well. If Facebook is the only way to know when upcoming events for your organization are being scheduled, then there's a problem. If you are posting to inaccessible social media networks (i.e., Facebook), then make sure you are posting the same content to social media networks that can serve up accessible content (i.e., Twitter). It is also important to make sure and post contains a text-based description if posting a picture, ad, or some other visually driven element to social media.
If the third-party website is inaccessible, then an accessible alternative must be readily available for users with disabilities. It is not the responsibility of the third-party website to maintain accessibility standards, because they are not forcing you to use their website. The vulnerability would shift to you if you are directing users to an inaccessible website and a disabled user cannot engage in the same experience as users without disabilities.
The short-answer is yes. Any content added to Panopto (NIC's video content management system) will have captions auto-generated.
Cases where human-generated captions are necessary:
- The video is intended for the Public or All Students,
- An Accommodation Request has been made to Disability Support Services
In most other cases, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions, or "auto-captions", will suffice. However, it is much easier to caption each piece of content as it is created, than it is to caption a whole semester's worth of video if an accommodation request is made to DSS.
For guidelines on creating quality captions, checkout the NIC Video Captioning Tips.
Not all videos require audio descriptions. Such is the case if your video was very simple in nature, such as an informative “talking head” video that a blind/low-vision user could effectively engage in the same experience as a user with regular vision.
Cases where audio descriptions are necessary:
- The video has content represented visually that is not represented in the audio, and
- The video is intended for the public or all students,
- An accommodation request has been made to Disability Support Services
Luckily, Panopto has a very robust solution for including audio descriptions with your video. Similar to captioning a video, a content creator can type out what should be said in the text-to-speech audio description and when it should happen within the video. The audio description feature can be toggled on/off via the "AD" button within the Panopto player controls.