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Accessibility guidelines regarding video and audio captions

These guidelines for accessibility concern video and audio content published in Aalto University's websites and social media channels (Youtube, Facebook etc.). Everyone producing and posting video and audio should know these guidelines.
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Photo: Esa Kapila

European Union's directive on accessibility will come into effect 23 September 2020. The purpose of the directive is to guarantee that everyone can get information in a form suitable for them. Accessibility serves not only people with a loss of hearing or vision, but also users who are not fully proficient in a language.

  • According to the directive, all videos published by Aalto University must have some form of captions in the original language of the video (for example, if people talking in the video are talking in Finnish, then captions should be in Finnish). Captions should also describe relevant sound information (for example laughter, applause).
  • Live streams are not required to be captioned. If a recording of the event is published later, then the recording needs to be captioned.
  • Accessibility captions are required for all videos published on Aalto University's social media channels. For Youtube, captions file can be delivered alongside the video as a separate subtitles file (.srt, .sbv, .sub). For other channels, captions should be burned in the video.
  • Responsibility for providing subtitles/captions for a video is with the producer of the video.
  • You can use external service provider for creating captions, or you can create them yourself, by using for example the subtitling tool in Panopto video service.
  • Captions for a video need to be published within 14 days from the publishing date of the video.
  • For accessibility in teaching you can find separate instructions from the OPIT wiki pages (in Finnish)

More information on accessibility requirements (in Finnish) (saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi)

See also

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Digital accessibility

Digital accessibility ensures that Aalto University’s systems, electronic services, and digital materials can be used and understood by everyone. This page brings together key principles, practical guidelines, and tools for designing accessible content and websites in line with legal requirements.

Equality, diversity and inclusion at Aalto
This service is provided by:

Communications Services

For further support, please contact us.
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