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Videos and audios should be created and shown in ways that include all members of the web audience and ensures that everyone access their content. An accessible video can includes these elements:
Captions are versions of the audio content that provide text matched with the video. They are crucial to ensuring your video is inclusive to students, employees, and members of the public who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions are helpful for neurodivergent people with Dyslexia, Autism, ADHD and people with auditory processing disorder (APD). They are also beneficial to those who don’t speak English natively. Having captions for your video helps to open up your content to a much larger audience including those who rely on assistive technologies.
Free help tools for adding captions
There are several free captioning tools available to help site editors make their videos and audios accessible. Some of them are:
Using YouTube
YouTube can generate captions for most videos as you upload them using a speech recognition technology. These captions are machine generated and as a result can contain some inaccuracies. If it turns out the accuracy is acceptable and captions can be adjusted with minor corrections, you may choose to do so in YouTube.
You may choose to create a transcript to support your video. This is a simple way to provide captions for your video and may be necessary if the automatic caption generator is not working for you in YouTube or other software. Transcripts only contain the text of what is being spoken on the video and do not require any time codes. These typically work best when videos are under 1 hour long, the audio is good quality and contains clear speech. You will need to ensure the transcript is in the same language as what is being spoken in your video. You will also need to format your transcript file in a way that is recommended by the software hosting your video, such as YouTube.
You may also choose to have an additional track of audio for your video that describes the video. This assistive narration attempts to describe the content of the video for those who have a visual impairment. Audio description is a commentary that guides a listener through scenes, settings, body language and other objective descriptions between portions of dialog or music. When using this feature you must ensure your media player supports audio description.
Our Accessibility Support Specialist Team is here to help with all your accessibility questions and needs. You can reach us through:
If you would like to know how your site is doing with accessibility:
Need additional assistance?
Check out our CMS tutorials
Attend one of our Virtual Open Labs hosted twice per week:
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 10 - 11 a.m. and 1:30 - 4 p.m. (academic year hours)
Don't forget the Request Help Gadget!
Located in the top right of your screen inside the CMS.