5. Make audio and video more accessible
For consideration
As with all forms of content on your site, different disabilities and cognitive considerations lead to other methods of accessing and understanding your content.
With audio and video, some distinct access and engagement limitations affect nearly every user at some point or another.
Let’s consider the key access limitations
Deaf people or anyone unable to listen to your content can’t hear your audio or video. Here, transcriptions and captions become essential to content engagement.
Blind or sight-impaired users won’t be able to see your video or in-video captions, but they can enjoy the audio, including any additional descriptive details you provide.
Suggested approach
Improve audio and video engagement by ensuring you publish transcriptions for your videos, podcasts, or other audio you release.
Be sure to caption your videos.
Captioning silent videos
It’s easy to assume that a video without audio wouldn’t need captioning. However, if a user expects a video to have audio, it can be confusing when there is none.
Suggested approach
Users with a hearing impairment may feel like they are missing out, while others may think the mute button is on or their computer speakers aren’t working.
It’s always good to include a captioning note such as, “This video has no audio.”
Don't just caption, transcript too
There's a standard of practice that typically leads to captioning as a default and transcriptions as an afterthought.
While legislation is related to captioning video files across many jurisdictions, transcription is generally not a standard of practice.
From a content point of view, when captions already exist, making a transcript from these is usually relatively easy.
Captions won't exist for standalone audio such as podcasts; therefore, extra effort is required to produce a transcript.
Why is this important?
In addition to the needs of deaf users, three additional considerations are not often recognized and can affect the majority of your audience:
- There are many situations where someone can't listen to audio. Perhaps they're in a public place without headphones, or they won't be able to hear or focus on the audio.
- People understand and best engage with content in different ways. For everyone who loves a podcast, there may be someone who would prefer to read. We limit content engagement when we don't provide multiple means of accessing content.
- Longer-form content like videos and podcasts are difficult to reference or navigate when they don't have text or other structured formats that can live outside the audio or video. This challenge stems from the fact that audio and video content cannot easily be searched, scanned, bookmarked, or indexed by search engines.
Going beyond text transcripts
For consideration
Captioning alone cannot clarify the context when videos demonstrate actions or include charts, graphs, infographics, or other complex visuals.
In this case, breaking out complex visual ideas into a richer set of more accessible multimedia content can be beneficial. Descriptive video may be required for the hearing impaired. But that is just a starting point.
Where a transcript may focus on spoken text or even some descriptive video text, we can achieve more by going beyond text transcripts.
Consider a video with a title card with contextually relevant text that is not read aloud. This is where descriptive video would include the text on the title card, and a transcript would include this added element. A transcript or captions will not capture this information.
Now consider a video that includes an infographic, a series of on-screen data, and a demonstration of two people performing an un-described activity together. A descriptive video will play a part in articulating this context to someone who can't see the video.
There's another step we can take.
We can improve access, engagement, and search engine optimization by breaking all of the video content out into a rich multimedia website with text, images, infographics, titles, and more, for people who:
- Learn in different ways
- Can't watch the video due to situational circumstances
- Wish to reference an element of the video