Make Your Content More Accessible While Boosting Engagement - John Orr of Art - Reach
Art-Reach Executive Director John Orr and James Copes discuss captioning
Tolsma Productions’ President, James Copes, was excited to have a chance to chat with John Orr, Executive Director of Art-Reach. Art-Reach is an organization which envisions a world where people where everyone has equitable access to the arts. John shared how he creates brief videos, makes them accessible, and how this supports the professional content that they share. Here's a closer look at his strategies and experiences, all underlined by the goal of fostering engagement and inclusivity.
Quick videos with captions build engagement
When asked how he started doing his DIY videos, John said, “I wanted to talk about cool things that we were doing. I realized we were out in the community so much for some of our programming that it was easy to kind of do a quick selfie video for a few minutes and just pop it out there.” He found it was a good way to make quick content and get more engagement on Art-Reach’s social media platforms. John uses the captioning app AutoCap, and he uses the free version which has the app’s name in the corner of each video. He prefers this look, as it helps to show that these are not professional productions, helping to make the content more accessible. Apple iPhone users can download AutoCap here. Google Android users can download App here
James explained how Tolsma productions generally uses an SRT file (aka a SubRip Subtitle file) in their videos. This is “a specially formatted plain text file that has timecodes in it,” and is used to store subtitles or captions, linked to the audio. What John is doing with the AutoCap app is known as burned in or open captions, meaning they are visually part of the video and can’t be turned on or off.
Inspiration can come from many places
John was inspired to make these quick videos in various ways. In one case, he wanted to illustrate how many of their Access Partner sites were on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, like the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Franklin Institute, and the museums further up. And “sometimes I would just have a random thought and so I would just take my phone out and it'd be me in the basement.”
Professional and DIY play well together
DIY videos complement professionally produced content because putting out regular content builds and maintains the audience so they will be there to view the professional videos. This allows an organization to have regular video posts on their social media channels while staying within their budget. Accessibility builds inclusion James notes that “Captioning is great for more than just people who need captioning to understand the video. People with autoplay on they usually have the video muted and they're going to get a lot more out of it if there's text on screen.” John also uses verbal descriptions as an additional way to make the videos accessible. “There's a way to embed accessibility that feels so natural, and so totally seamless. But it doesn't feel like an accessible accommodation. That's how you start to build inclusion. That's where inclusive design and inclusive human centered consideration opens your content up to everybody.”
This blog originally appeared in AFP-GPC’s August 30th blog here.