Accessibility: Media

Why Is This Important?
  • Ensure everyone has equal access to information and experiences.
  • Allows individuals to fully engage with content.
  • Improve comprehension, usability and learning outcomes.
When To Use It

Anytime media communicates information, such as learning content, instructions, policies or services.

How To Use It

Videos should have:

  • Captions,
  • Audio descriptions,
  • Use an accessible media player.

Audio-only media should have:

  • A text transcript

Images and graphics should have:

  • Alternative text,
  • Color contrast,
  • Descriptions for complex visuals.
Creating Accessible Content
Audio

Audio content should be clear, easy to understand and accessible to those who cannot hear or who process information differently.
Video

Video content should avoid flashing on screen, use open captions and provide descriptions for important visual information to ensure accessibility for users who may have visual differences.
Captions

Captions provide synchronized text for spoken and meaningful audio content, ensuring videos are accessible to people who cannot hear.
Transcripts

Transcripts allow audio and video content to become accessible to hard of hearing individuals, those who process information better through text, and users who are in noisy or quiet environments.
Media Player Accessibility

A media player is a tool or application that lets users play, pause, control and interact with audio or video content. Panopto and YouTube are designed to be accessible.

Keyboard Accessibility
  • Video players must be fully controllable with a keyboard (play, pause, volume, seek).
Audio Control
  • A mechanism should be provided to stop, pause, mute or adjust volume for audio that automatically plays on a page for more than three seconds.
  • Do not include autoplaying audio in most cases. If you do embed autoplaying audio, you must use services that provide players to stop, pause, mute and adjust volume controls. YouTube provides this.
Timed Content
  • Users need the option to turn off, adjust or extend the time limit of a page or element with timed content. (Real-time events need not meet this requirement.)
  • Users need the option to pause, stop or hide automatically moving, blinking or scrolling content lasting longer than five seconds. You may upload moving, blinking or scrolling content that lasts less than five seconds.
  • Users don't need the option to pause, stop, hide and manually control automatically updating content like automatically redirecting or refreshing a page, a news ticker, AJAX updated field or notification alerts.
  • If you embed code or content from third-party services, you must use only those that comply with these time-based guidelines.

Inform Users When Not Needed

If your video does not need captions (because there is no substantive audio content) or does not need description (because there is no substantive visual content), it’s good to make users aware.

You can alert users in the captions file with an appropriate indication, such as [background music]. Or you can provide the information in text with the video, such as:

  • Captions not needed: The only sound in this video is background music.
  • Description not needed: The visuals in this video only support what is spoken; the visuals do not provide additional information.
Tips for Checking Accessibility

Materials to meet A and AA requirements include:

  • Captions,
  • Transcripts,
  • Audio Descriptions.
Trainings and Resources
Articles