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Video Accessibility
Checklist
- Captions/Subtitles
- Useful for those with audio difficulties or those who don't want the sound on
- Subtitles should be provided covering all the spoken and some non-spoken segments of the video
- Some elements such as music should be indicated
- Planning the visuals so subtitles will not cover up important areas of the content benefits everyone
- Some systems allow the creator to place and style captions but many do not and use white text on a black box or black text sitting on the video
- Creating them in such as way that the user can choose to show them or not is ideal but they can be created so they always show
- Some systems like YouTube will create captions for you but you sacrifice accuracy
- Some systems allow you to upload a script and will sync the text with the audio
- Some systems allow you to correct any errors in automatic captions
- Audio description of Visual Inforamtion
- Useful for those with visual difficulties
- Describes visual information needed to understand the content of the video
- Any text displayed in the video, such as section headings, should be read into an audio description
- Audio descriptions are not as well supported as captions (yet) but help just as many people
- For many systems, you simply have to make 2 versions of the video unless you either want everyone to hear the descriptions or no one to have access to them - one with audio descriptions and one without
- Transcripts
- Including a transcript - a sepate text file with the script of the video - is useful to many
- Ideally, a transcript includes not only the spoken parts of the video but includes descriptions as well
- This can be useful to people with a slow internet connection as they can simply read the content of the video
- It is useful for videos with a lot of facts or figures as it is easy to get back to the facts or figures to reference later
- Since not everyone has access to the same word processor, using plain text files allows everyone to read the transcript in their
- Transcripts are typically linked with the video but are not necessarily part of the video itself
