Video Annotation

Video annotation is the process of adding supplementary information — such as text descriptions, captions, audio descriptions, or semantic labels — to specific segments or elements of a video. In accessibility contexts, video annotations provide the additional layers of information needed to make visual and auditory content perceivable by people with sensory disabilities. Annotations can be created manually by human describers, generated automatically through speech recognition and computer vision, or produced through collaborative crowdsourcing approaches. A key principle in modern video annotation for accessibility is modality independence: the same annotation data can be rendered as on-screen captions, sent to a Braille display, or read aloud by speech synthesis, depending on the user's needs and preferences.