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Alanna Burke edited this page May 5, 2019 · 3 revisions

Accessible Videos

How to make videos accessible to people with disabilities

  • Captions
  • Transcripts
  • Use an accessible player
  • Let people know what to expect with an accessibility statement
  • Provide support & ways to contact you
  • If you already have a lot of videos, make a plan & schedule, put it in your statement.
  • Start with the most watched videos or caption on demand.
  • If you have user-uploaded content, require users to include captions & transcript.
  • If you can’t, add a statement explaining who is responsible for the content & contact info.
  • Require uploaders to agree that they are responsible for accessibility of uploaded materials.

8 Steps to Creating Accessible Video

  • “Videos that include captions means that double the number of people will finish watching your video (from 40% up to 80%) – and remember your search ranking is directly related to how long people spend on your site.”
  • “The video itself may be too fast-paced for people with cognitive impairments.”
  • Make sure your video is visually accessible - large text, contrast, etc
  • Accessible video player must be keyboard navigable, voice navigable, etc
  • Never allow autoplay - people with a screen reader can’t hear over it, people can’t find the source of the audio
  • No flashing content!
  • Transcript - should describe everything that is happening in the video, not just spoken words.
  • “A study by 3PlayMedia found uni students overwhelmingly recommended interactive transcripts (94.8%). This is due to a number of factors, including multi-sensory engagement, the ability to move at their own pace and the capacity to copy and paste information from the transcript into their own study guides.”
  • “Audio Descriptions - This is a spoken audio track played along with the video and it lets blind and vision-impaired users know what’s happening on the screen. It is important that this includes all visual information. These can be a bit tricky, and ideally should be taken into consideration during the production of the video, although “extended” audio descriptions can be used where the video itself pauses while the audio description plays.”
  • Consider having an in-picture sign-language translation if this is something your audience would find useful.

How to create accessible videos

  • Don’t rely on automatic subtitles - write & upload your own, or get a company to do it.
  • Make sure the subtitles themselves are accessible! Large, clear, contrast.
  • Accessible video player
  • Voiceovers to describe slides
  • Be aware of music/sounds levels
  • Be aware of both sight and hearing loss. Some transcripts can be exported to braille!
  • No autoplay

Trends in Video Accessibility

  • Many people watch videos without sound for many reasons - make sure your video can be understood without it
  • Major Video accessibility laws:
    • The Rehabilitation Act: Federal government, online learning, private colleges, public colleges, state governments, municipalities, faith organizations, and K-12 schools
    • The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): Training videos, public website videos, streaming media, online learning, private colleges, public colleges, state governments, municipalities, K-12 schools
    • The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA): Broadcast television, streaming media, faith organizations
    • The Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Broadcast television, faith organizations
    • State laws: Private colleges, public colleges, state government, municipalities, K-12 schools

Accessible Documents

Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF

  • Compared with HTML content, information published in a PDF is harder to find, use and maintain.
  • unless created with sufficient care PDFs can often be bad for accessibility and rarely comply with open standards.
  • If you can’t avoid publishing a PDF, ideally it should be in addition to an HTML version and the PDF must meet accessibility standards
  • Problems with PDFS:
    • They do not change size to fit the browser
      • PDFs are not designed to be flexible in their layout.
      • They generally require a lot of zooming in and out, and scrolling both vertically and horizontally.
      • This is especially troublesome with long documents and on small devices like mobile phones.
    • It’s harder to track their use
      • We cannot get data about how users have interacted with a PDF – for example how long they’ve viewed it for or what links they’ve followed.
      • This makes it harder to identify issues or find ways to make improvements.
    • They’re not designed for reading on screens
      • A PDF document that was created for offline use will not suit the context of the web and is likely to result in a poor user experience.
    • They cause difficulties for navigation and orientation
      • PDFs might open in a new browser window, new tab or a separate app.
      • They might automatically download to the user's device.
      • Whatever happens, the user is taken away from the website when they open a PDF.
      • This means they lose the context of the website and its navigation, making it harder for them to go back if they need to.
      • More of an issue if the user goes directly to the PDF from a search engine.
      • Without the context of the site, they can’t easily browse to related content or search the website.
      • It’s also worth remembering that although many devices and browsers have PDF viewers built-in - and they are freely available to download - there are still users who do not have them, or cannot download them.
    • They can be hard for some users to access
      • it needs to have a logical structure based on tags and headings, meaningful document properties, readable body text, good colour contrast and text alternatives for images
      • Some users need to change browser settings such as colours and text size to make web content easier to read. It’s difficult to do this for content in PDFs.
      • You can magnify the file, but the words might not wrap and the font might pixelate, making for a poor user experience.
      • They’re less likely to be kept up to date
      • Compared with HTML, it’s harder to update a PDF once it’s been created and published.
      • Users are more likely to download a PDF and continue to refer to it and share it offline.
      • They may not expect the content in the PDF to change and might not check the website to get the latest information.
    • HTML documents encourage people to refer to the website for the latest version.
      • They’re hard to reuse
      • It can be very difficult to reuse content from a PDF by copy and pasting it.

Accessibility of PDFs

Accessible Images

Writing Great Alt Text

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