3.4 Alternative formats

Have you ever watched a video on Youtube or listened to an audio track? Did you notice a transcript and if so did you use it? Did the video have captions or subtitles showing what was being said on the video? Did you find these helpful?

Maybe you found the captions distracting if you didn’t need them, or maybe you ignored the transcript. But there is also the chance that these were vital to your ability to actually get something out of the video – for some people they are essential to using the video.

You also need to think about the textual material in your course which will be displayed online. You need to use appropriate sentence construction to make text more accessible to learners and to help reduce screen fatigue. For example long sentences and paragraphs are heavy to read and absorb. In the online setting a long paragraph listing a series of facts or aspects of a concept can often be broken into a bulleted or numbered list. This makes it visually clearer to read on screen and easier to understand, especially if a screen reader is being used to read the material out loud to the learner.

Providing alternative formats of your course materials is good practice both for accessibility purposes and supporting learners who might have limited internet availability or need flexible options for study. In addition, requiring the learner to only use one format to access a particular piece of learning can be a barrier – for example people often study in spaces where they cannot easily listen to audio. This might be when using a computer in a public library or when at home with other people. Requiring them to listen to an audio file without providing a transcript they can read instead can be a barrier.to learning

For example, video is good for many users providing them with a direct visual and audio connection to an explanation of a concept, a lecture or an interview, but for users who are visually impaired, deaf, have certain types of dyslexia or have internet bandwidth limitations, online video is often inaccessible or harder to use, though for some people with dyslexia visual resources are vital tools to aid understanding of text heavy materials. In addition, many users who don’t have any problems with video or prefer not to watch a video like to use a transcript of a video, especially if it is searchable or can be printed out as this allows them to annotate the transcript or quickly find a point they observed in the video when they first watched it. The same goes for audio. Providing transcripts and captions/subtitles (video) is good practice when you are using video or audio in a course.

3.3 OU Structured content tools

3.4.1 Images and accessibility