Featured Feature WCAG Series Episode 5: Fully Accessible Videos

Featured Feature: WCAG Series

A Featured Feature that isn’t really a feature, but is so important it gets its own miniseries: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

In this episode, David builds on the topic of videos with audio. Captions help people who can’t hear, but what about those who can’t see, or can’t see and hear? He shows how to add audio descriptions to explain the visuals, and how detailed text descriptions (even as a PDF) can make content fully accessible for everyone, including users with slow internet. The key message: combine captions, audio descriptions and text alternatives to make your videos truly inclusive.

👇 Watch the fifth episode.

Full transcript

 Hey everyone, it's David again with another video on WCAG. I kind of want to continue our talk about videos with audio. And in our previous video we talked about captions and how to make video accessible to users who can't listen to the audio. Well, this video tackles different group of users, users who can't view the video, or even users who can't view or listen to the video. And what to do in those situationsin order to make it accessible to them.

So who's this for? Facial impaired users, also users with cognitive disabilities who have trouble understanding the video. Having these options that I'm gonna show you in a second will make it more accessible to them as well. And then of course, always try to think broad; you have users that are in situations with visual limitations. They can't properly see their screen. And then this solution that I'm gonna show you will also provide more accessibility to them.

Why does it matter? Everyone should be able to view your media content, should be able to understand it and digest the information that's being presented.

So, yeah. Let me show you how this looks like in the platform, right? So I have a content part here with a YouTube video in there. Very simple. I've already provided this video with captions so it's accessible to learners that can't listen to the audio.

But what about learners that can view the actual video? Well, for these type of learners, for these type of users, you need to add an audio description. So you have to imagine they can listen to the original video, but they can't watch it.

So what you do is you add an audio description that sort of fills in the gaps. So that explains the visual elements, the key visual elements of the video in a way that they can understand it and they know what's going on in its entirety for this video. Right. So that's how you make it accessible for blind users, for example.

Now, next to that, you also have what you call a detailed textual description. This is very similar to transcripts or video descriptions for video-only content, but it goes a bit further.

Basically, a detailed textual description is all the narration, all the visual elements, all the audio, important sounds, all yeah, transcribed into one big text. That way if you have very slow internet and you can't access the video, you can access the description, right, the textual description and read that, which is great. Or even if you are completely blind and deaf, you can go through this as well. They have devices that turn the page into braille and then they can still digest this text based description basically.

And it's very simple. I put it again at content part info over here. Right. So let me quickly show you that. So I go down, again, I say; Hey, go check out more information if you wanna see the textual description. And I expand this and it loads because I have put it here in a PDF. Now the reason for that is simply that it can be a lot of text, and then having it in a PDF is more accessible. You can also download it. All that type of stuff. So you can always consider that putting it in the PDF for transcripts as well. If it's a lot of text, don't hesitate and just put it in PDF, it's all fine. But yeah, that's basically how you make your videos completely accessible.

All right, so just a quick recap.

If you have videos with audio, make sure that they next to captions also have a text-based description describing all the stuff that's happening in the video or an audio description, which fills in the missing visual elements of that video. But if you're thinking, damn, David, that's a lot of stuff I need to do for these videos. Yes, yes, that's correct. But there is some leeway, luckily.

If you only go for level A compliance, you don't need to do audio descriptions. Those are double, well double A level AA compliance basically. So if you wanna skip that, you can, or if you wanna save that for later, that's totally fine. Just focus on those captions, focus on the text based descriptions, and you should be good when it comes to accessibility.

That's it for the WCAG episodes, at least for now.

That's all we have planned. We went through the content related guidelines. I hope they were informative. I really hope I helped you at least form a picture of all the stuff that needs to be done when it comes to your content.

If you have more questions though, please ask them.

We're here to help. We can always make more videos. I can always help you out more. It's totally fine. You know, I know this is a bunch of work. Accessibility is a bunch of work, but it is for truly a good cause.

We're also working on it very, very hard.

So yeah, help each other out. Help us out. Let us know what you're struggling with.

Simple as that.

So yeah, check you later.

Have a good one.