Increasing accessibility of audiovisual materials in the institutional repository at Florida State University

Abstract

In early 2020, Florida State University Libraries' Office of Digital Research and Scholarship received a small Panhandle Library Access Network (PLAN) Innovation Grant to increase the accessibility of its institutional repository, Diginole, through the creation of video captions and audio transcripts for audiovisual materials. While these audio and video files represent a fairly small percentage of the scholarly outputs found in Diginole, they present a unique set of technical challenges with regard to accessibility when compared to traditional, text-based materials. While text materials can benefit greatly from automatic processes such as OCR (optical character recognition) found in most modern PDF readers and other applications, no such automated, cost-effective “out of the box” solutions are currently available that can guarantee accurate, high-quality captions and transcriptions for AV materials. This column will provide a brief technical history of AV accessibility standards in addition to describing processes of identifying materials for captioning/transcription, selecting a vendor, and provide practical information related to audio and video accessibility that other institutions can hopefully leverage for their own improvements to their IRs.