Your content is top-of-the-line. You have precision subtitles to engage your hearing-impaired audience. You have an audio track with descriptions for the visually-impaired. Your stellar DVD is now fully accessible to all audiences… or is it? How does a visually-impaired user navigate? How do they know which button to press? How many buttons are there? Are the buttons easy to select?
You can make DVD navigation accessible by creating spoken menus. Each menu button uses an audio file to narrate the button text to the user. This can be accomplished with any DVD authoring system, but there can be some obstacles. DVD Studio Pro only allows you to add audio to a menu but not to a specific button. We’ve come up with a solution.
Here’s an example:
1. Our simple DVD has six buttons that we need spoken. First we design our menu and then duplicate it for a total of six identical menus. Each menu is then named according to the button we would like to voice (eg. Chapter 1, Chapter 2).
2. Now it’s time to add an audio file to each menu.
The At End: property is set to still to keep the audio from looping.
3. Linking the buttons. On the Chapter 1 menu, we select the Chapter 1 button and link it to Chapter 1 of the video track, just as we always would. This button has a yellow highlight, and has Auto Action turned OFF in the advanced settings.
For all of the “extra” buttons in this Chapter 1 menu, we set the yellow highlight to zero opacity, we turn Auto Action ON in the advanced settings, and we link the button to its appropriate menu. (eg. Chapter 2 Button will link to the Chapter 2 Menu :: Chapter 2 Button of that menu.) We repeat this for all menus.
Auto Action causes a button to automatically navigate to its target as soon as it is selected (using either a mouse or remote control).
Because of varying DVD load times, we recommend adding 1/2 second of blank audio at the beginning of all audio files. This helps prevent the DVD player from clipping the beginning of each of your button audio clips.
Pros:
This works great with still menus.
This helps people watching on a DVD player or computer.
This provides a good solution for DVD Studio Pro limitations.
This technique is transferable to other DVD authoring systems.
Cons:
Doesn’t work with motion menus.
Takes a little bit of extra time to connect all of the buttons properly.
When playing on a DVD player, jumping between chapters will have a slight, but noticeable, pause.
What other solutions have you found for making DVDs easily accessible? We would love to hear about what you’ve done.