Media is an important aspect of your content strategy. Accessible media is vital to helping your media reach the broadest audience.
Accessible media is defined by three main characteristics:
- Visuals – Can your viewers access all the visuals in the media through sight, sound, or touch?
- Audio – Can your viewers access all the sound in the media through sight, sound, or touch?
- Media Player – Can your viewers access the video through an accessible media player using sight, sound, or touch?
These requirements may seem a bit daunting, but if you plan for accessibility from the beginning then the process is much easier to complete.
In addition to our Video and Audio Content Accessibility Resources, we recommend incorporating the following three steps into your media workflows.
- Plan ahead for your visuals
- Provide captions and descriptive transcripts
- Inform users of accessibility features
1. Plan ahead for your visuals
Just like images on your webpages, some visuals convey essential information and others are just for decoration. If the visual information in your media is essential to understanding the content then they must be described.
The best way to do this is to incorporate these visual descriptions directly into your dialogue. You can do this by:
- Asking speakers to identify themselves before they start speaking rather than relying on title cards alone
- Describing text or visuals rather than assuming the viewer will read or see the screen alone
- Adding text pop-ups at the same time the information is included in the narration rather than adding it as extra information not in the narration
- Reading end screen text aloud rather than relying on the viewer to read themselves
Bottom line: if it’s important enough to be in the video, it’s important enough to be in the narration or dialogue. For an example, review the video in the Description section of this page.
Say what the viewer ‘sees’
Descriptions
In this video, the speaker is discussing different types of low vision. About a minute into the video, she holds up different visual aids and provides a detailed description.
Since the information on the screen is fully included in the dialogue of the video, no additional audio description is required. Closed captions are provided in the video.
Write what the viewer ‘hears’
Captions
YouTube has built-in tools to help generate a caption track. However, automatic captions are only a starting point. You must always review and edit your captions for accuracy.
In this video, learn how to access and use the captioning tools available within YouTube. Video contains descriptions of essential information and closed captions.
Bringing it all together
Transcripts
If you’ve described your visuals in your video, these will be included in your caption track, and subsequently within your transcript. Now all you have to do is provide a copy of the transcript on the same page with your embedded YouTube video and voila! You have just created an accessible media experience for your audience.
In this video, learn how to find and copy your transcript from your YouTube video. Descriptions and closed captions are provided. A video transcript is available after the video.