Video content should be designed and presented in a way that is easily accessed and understood by all individuals, including those with disabilities. Creating accessible multimedia is key to providing equitable experiences. The following guides and tutorials about captions, transcripts, audio descriptions, and photosensitivity testing will help creators produce audio and video content that is accessible to a wide audience.
Beginning March 22, 2025, videos uploaded to MediaSpace will have machine-generated captions automatically ordered and applied at no charge.
Provide captions for all video content. WebAIM defines captions as text versions of speech and other important audio content. Captions are synchronized to appear at the same time as the corresponding audio.
Provide transcripts for all audio and video content. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) defines transcripts as text versions of the speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the content of a piece of media. Transcripts are verbatim records of everything in the audio or video recording. Transcripts identify who is speaking, and note other important sounds that are a part of the recording.
Providing a transcript for prerecorded audio-only media ensures that individuals have an equivalent method of accessing the information in the recording. Examples of audio-only media include podcasts, interviews, and speeches.
Provide audio descriptions for all video content. An audio description is a narration added to the video soundtrack to describe important visual details that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone. This narration provides information about actions, characters, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content. In a standard audio description, narration is added during existing pauses in dialogue. The audio description track is typically an alternate audio track that can be enabled within the video player by the viewer.
A single person speaking directly to the camera is an example of a style of video that would not require an audio description track, because all information in the video is already being conveyed through the audio track. To avoid the need for audio description, consider the following: does the person speaking identify themselves at the start of the video? Does any text appear on screen that is not spoken aloud? Does the person refer to any other information, such as a chart, that is not also described in the audio track? If no additional information in a video is conveyed visually, an audio description is not required.
The intent of WCAG success criterion 2.3.1 is “to allow users to access the full content of a site without inducing seizures due to photosensitivity.” Paid services are available to test video files, resulting in a pass or fail certificate. The cost is based on the length of the video.