Games and Multimedia

Back to Resource List.

Audio and Captioning (6 Links)  An Interview with Joe Clark by Craig Saila. This article poses questions on accessibility techniques and captioning to Joe Clark, author of "Building Accessible Websites". 

Audio Toolkit Project. The Audio Toolkit Project developed by GIST (Glasgow Interactive Systems Group) has demonstrations of audio widgets created in Java. They include audio buttons which make a sound on mouseover or on clicking, audio pull-down menus, audio progress bars, and audio drag and drop. 

Best Practices in Online Captioning. This article from Joe Clark details how to provide accessible online captions for video.  Captioning Web. Has various links relating to captioning. 

NCAM (National Center for Accessible Media). A research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media and information technology for people with disabilities. Includes MAGpie (Media Access Generator), an authoring tool for creating captions and audio descriptions for multimedia. 

TubeCaption. TubeCaption has a captioning editor, Captionizer, which simplify the process of making and publishing captions for video. Transcripts and raw caption texts can also be crawled by search engines. 

Back to Top of Page

Flash (4 Links)  Creating Accessible Macromedia Flash Content by Jared Smith, October 2004. This tutorial from WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) gives examples and tips on making Flash accessible. It includes sections on Assistive Technology Support for Flash, Text Equivalents, Keyboard Accessibility, and Other Accessibility Techniques and Considerations. </li>

Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept by Joe Clark. This article highlights the issues around the accessibility of Macromedia Flash MX and Flash Player 6. </li>

Flash Techniques and testing tips from the RNIB (Royal National Institute of the Blind) for making Flash MX 2004 (version 7) accessible. </li>

Flash MX: Moving Toward Accessible Rich Media by Andrew Kirkpatrick. This article describes some of the inaccessible elements of Macromedia Flash MX and Flash Player 6.</li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

Flash: Accessible Examples (3 Links)  DigNubia from Education Development Centre, Inc. A set of archeological learning objects with alt tags for images; keyboard and screen-reader accessible Flash; an HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) version; video clips with closed captions and audio descriptions; and transcripts of video clips and audio descriptions. </li>

GeoNet from Houghton Mifflin Social Studies. A Flash animation on world geography in the form of a quiz. </li> Zoot Suit Culture from PBS and WGBH. This object consists of captioned interviews and static images.</li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

Games: Accessible Examples (2 Links)  Pre-Season Puzzles - Crossword Puzzles from Houghton Mifflin Education Place. Crossword puzzles on the theme of American football which are keyboard accessible. </li>

VIPgameszone Games for blind and visually impaired people including a space strategy maze game, tennis game and several others.</li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

Multimedia (5 Links)  Accessible Digital Media: Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web. by NCAM (National Center for Accessible Media), Boston, April 2006. These guidelines offer suggestions for making multimedia (images, audio and video) used in e-books accessible to people with audio or visual disabilities. They includes guidelines for: images, forms, tables, digital publications, interactivity, graphs, maths, and multimedia. </li> Creating Accessible iTunes U Content. NCAM (National Center for Accessible Media) has created step-by-step guidelines on developing accessible media for iTunes U, covering: closed captions and audio descriptions that the user can turn on or off; open subtitles and descriptions available to everyone watching or listening; closed subtitles for adding multiple language tracks to video files; and accessible PDFs. </li>

NCAM Rich Media Accessibility. This part of the NCAM (National Center for Accessible Media) website includes examples and tips on making multimedia accessible, including Director, Flash, PDF, Quicktime, Real Media, Scalable Vector Graphics, SMIL, Windows Media and XHTML+SMIL. It also has information on assistive technology support, audio descriptions, captions, extended audio description, keyboard access, self-voicing and text transcripts. </li>

Skills for Access. The Skills for Access website has a number of resources based on creating accessible multimedia for e-learning. It includes case studies, articles, challenges to e-learning, and basic design techniques for making multimedia accessible. </li>

SMIL and SVG: Towards Accessible Multimedia by Charles McCathieNevile, Marja-Riitta Koivunen and Ian Jacobs, Web Accessibility Initiative. This paper describes the accessibility functionality of the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Specification.</li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

PowerPoint (3 Links) <ol> <li>PowerTalk - Talking Presentations. This open source software reads out PowerPoint presentations, including &lt;alt&gt; tags, using a synthesized voice. </li>

<li>The Incredible Accessible Presentation by Glenna Shaw, January 2004. This article describes techniques for accessible PowerPoint presentations. </li>

<li>W3C Slidemaker. The W3C Slidemaker converts an HTML page into set of slides, separating text from presentation.</li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

SecondLife (1 Link) <ol> <li>TextSL - a Second Life client for Visually Impaired and Blind Users. TextSL is a text-based client that works with SecondLife and JAWS. It allows the user to interact with SecondLife using text, and to receive text-based information with regard to location and the actions of other avatars. </li></ol>

Back to Top of Page

Video (2 Links) <ol> <li>Creating Video and Multimedia Products that are Accessible to People with Sensory Impairments by Sheryl Burgstahler. This article looks at ways of making multimedia content accessible. </li>

<li>Joe Clark Media Access. A list of links for accessible video, cinema, multimedia, captioning, etc. </li></ol>

End of Case Studies: Back to Top of Page