Accessibility: Videos

Why Is This Important?
  • Allows people with a wide range of abilities to perceive, understand and interact with the content.
  • Includes captions, keyboard-accessible audio controls and audio descriptions.
When To Use It

Anytime you're creating videos for digital use, including training videos, presentations, social media content or recorded meetings.

How To Use It
  • Include:
    • Captions for all spoken and nonspoken content (such as music, laughter, etc.).
    • Audio descriptons to convey important information if not explained through dialogue.
    • Clear, easy to read text (fonts, headings, spacing, etc.) for on-screen titles or graphics.
    • Simple and consistent visual layouts.
  • Avoid:
    • Autoplay without user control.
    • Relying on visuals to convey information.
    • Busy or flashing (for more than three times in one second) backgrounds.
    • Loud background music.
Best Practices
Captions
  • Editors must provide synchronized captions for all live multimedia containing audio, including audio-only broadcasts, webcasts, videos, video conferences and Flash animations.
  • When uploading a video, you must use a captioning service like those provided by YouTube. We recommend you manually enter captions, and then use the auto sync function rather than using the autocaptioning services provided on YouTube.
    • Our website's multimedia upload button allows for YouTube links only. They require you to have captioned your videos prior to uploading the link.
  • Visit Accessibility: Captions for more information.
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.
  • Visit audio for more information.
Flashing
  • No page content should flash more than three times per second.
  • The only exceptions are flashes that emit low contrast and don't contain too much red.
  • Uploaded or embedded content from third-party services must comply with the W3 Standards for acceptable flash thresholds.
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.
  • Users do 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.
  • You may upload moving, blinking or scrolling content less than five seconds.
  • If you embed code or content from third-party services, you must use only those which comply with these time-based guidelines.
Trainings and Resources
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