Becoming the Voice of Visuals: Audio Descriptions
When you present to an audience or for a recorded lecture, do you include visuals such as graphs, charts, animations or images to drive home a point in your presentations? Do you describe these visuals as they appear in your presentation? Audio/verbal descriptions of visual content ensure that all learners understand the key takeaways, and are essential for students who have low vision or are blind.
With a bit of planning, you can integrate verbal descriptions proactively into your lecture creation process – whether in the classroom or online. Here are some tips:
- Describe the purpose of each visual that contains instructional content and what learners should take away from it. You can skip describing decorative images.
- Keep your descriptions relevant and concise: You don’t have to describe every aspect of a picture (such as every color) if it doesn’t aid in understanding.
- Break down audio descriptions if necessary: For more complex visuals, consider segmenting them and highlighting different parts on separate slides.
- Avoid “follow-along language” that relies solely on visual elements to explain concepts. Phrases like “as you can see here…” or “the red line shows…” are often inaccessible to learners with low vision.
- More tips are in this DELTA Teaching Resources article: Creating and Recording Accessible Lectures and Presentations
These tips are a way to proactively make your visuals accessible, but what if you have already created videos without using these practices?
- Panopto allows for a separate audio track just for descriptions of your images. Learn how to add audio descriptions to your videos in Panopto (Panopto support article)
- See Examples of Audio Description Best Practices (Google Slides)
- Read a thorough article about describing visual information (from W3C Web Accessibility Collaborative)
