WebVTT Audio Descriptions for Elephants Dream

When I set out to improve accessibility on the Web and we started developing WebSRT – later to be renamed to WebVTT – I needed an example video to demonstrate captions / subtitles, audio descriptions, transcripts, navigation markers and sign language.

I needed a freely available video with spoken text that either already had such data available or that I could create it for. Naturally I chose “Elephants Dream” by the Orange Open Movie Project , because it was created under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

As it turned out, the Blender Foundation had already created a collection of SRT files that would represent the English original as well as the translated languages. I was able to reuse them by merely adding a WEBVTT header.

Then there was a need for a textual audio description. I read up on the plot online and finally wrote up a time-alignd audio description. I’m hereby making that file available under the Create Commons Attribution 4.0 license. I’ve added a few lines to the medadata headers so it doesn’t confuse players. Feel free to reuse at will – I know there are others out there that have a similar need to demonstrate accessibility features.