Videos - Making videos accessible

Question 1: captions covering up the action

We have 27 videos containing warm up stretches. Any captions are going to cover up half of the stretch so is not an ideal solution. Is there something else we can do?

Answer 1

If the videos include an audio track that contains meaningful information, then captions are required as per the Web Accessibility Standard.

Would placement of the captions at the top of the video reduce the issue? This is easily possible with newer captioning formats that allow a variety of caption styling and positioning options. The 3PlayMedia captioning service, for instance, can deliver captioning files with these options at a reasonable price.

Question 2: options for transcript location

We can't really add a transcript on the page, as all of the videos are on one page. Is it enough to have a downloadable transcript in a Word document or PDF? Or should we link off to another web page with a text transcript on it.

Ideally we don’t want to send them off the page. The videos have additional supporting text and image content that explains how to do the stretches so they can still do the stretches without watching the videos.

Answer 2

Where will you be hosting the videos? If you will be using YouTube or Vimeo or a similar service, it all gets even easier.

Sounds like the videos are the primary content and the supporting text and images are alternative ways to learn about the stretches. In this case, according to the Standard, the videos need to be made as accessible as possible, which means captioning and accompanying transcript (on the same or another page).

You note that the videos are all on one page in order to deliver a mobile first or mobile optimised experience. I may misunderstand, but depending on how the videos are loaded in the page, and even if they don’t all start playing immediately, initiating connections for 27 videos might significantly add to the page rendering time, affecting usability and the user’s mobile data plan.

Text is cheap from a bandwidth perspective. There are unobtrusive ways to add the text transcript under each video in a little expanding/collapsing disclosure widget. For example, see https://webtoolkit.govt.nz/blog/2015/05/assisted-digital-tradeshow-helping-people-use-shift-and-stay-digital/

As a general rule, we recommend against Word or PDF downloads as accessible alternative, particularly as they don’t work well on mobile devices with small viewports, and because they don’t deliver the information in a structured way to screen reader users on iOS or OS X.