This week, I shared a rough cut of the first video in my tutorial series. I edited the entirety of the audio, and had a few basic animations and motion graphics sprinkled throughout, to help give people a sense of what the video would be like to watch. I then asked people a few questions to get a sense of what they thought the experience of watching the video was like.

Everyone basically agreed that the video would hold their attention. People complimented the narration, saying that it wasn’t too fast or slow and was easy to understand. I also got a lot of compliments regarding the intro to the video, where I show users what a web page feels like to use when it isn’t accessible. This intro was one of the few video segments that was fully edited. I took the homepage to IMDB and blurred the text, made half of the buttons disappear, and replaced all of the images with question marks, to represent information that disabled people can’t access when websites are inaccessible. People thought this was a very effective visual.

There wasn’t much of a common thread between the negative criticisms that I got. One person was a bit confused by the first image in the video, which was a laptop on a table drawn with After Effects shapes. They said that it didn’t look much like a laptop, which let me know that I should pay very close attention to the shapes that I use, since when doing minimalist motion graphics, it’s easy for objects to become unrecognizable. I also got a few suggestions on ways to slim down the video – I got one comment suggesting I should remove the bit where I describe the specific number of accessibility lawsuits in 2017 and 2018. I also had one person suggest to me that I should cut any segments where visuals were hard to come up with. One person also suggested that I add some pauses in the audio, to let certain points hit home. So the video’s pacing could be adjusted some more. But other than that, people were generally optimistic about my rough cut.