How to make videos accessible to people with disabilities

Maybe you have training videos for poll workers. Or informational or educational videos for voters. Maybe you are starting to require candidates and campaigns to post certain of their videos on your website because you have campaign finance requirements.

How do you make sure that the videos are accessible to people with disabilities? Here are our recommendations.

Get the technical pieces in place

Start with the videos and players themselves:

  • Check the standards. The federal requirements in what’s known as “Section 508” are based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. There are likely state guidelines as well, so make sure you know what laws apply to your office.
  • Provide alternatives: captions (or at minimum a transcript) for any video, a transcript for any audio, and alternative text to describe visual information. Some platforms have technology built in to generate ALT text and captions automatically, but you’ll need to check their work.
  • Use an accessible video player. YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms not only support captions, but their players are accessible. Features change, so check the documentation to be sure.

Help visitors to your site know what to expect

Then, make sure visitors to your site know about the accessibility options and be ready to help them if they have a problem.

  • Have a good accessibility statement to let people with disabilities know how your site works. This information should be linked from the footer (usually a link near other legal information). The article How to write an accessibility statement will get you started. You can also look at some examples, like the accessibility statement we wrote for the Election Toolkit. Or this collection of examples from a disability legal office.
  • Provide support for people who are having difficulty with accessibility of any materials on the site. Include links for contacting you, so you can fix problems that you might not otherwise know about. Creating a transcript or captions for a short video can be less costly than defending an inaccessible file.

Make a plan for your current videos

If you already have a large collection of videos, don’t panic. Organize the task of making captions and add a note to the Accessibility Statement to let people know the plan and the schedule.

  • Caption every new video as you post it. If you have the script for the video (or text of prepared remarks) available, that job is even easier, because many captioning tools will automatically create captions from a transcript.
  • Use your server logs to identify the most frequently used videos and start with them. Once you have them done, work backwards from the most recent videos in your archive.
  • Caption videos on demand, responding quickly when asked. You might even put a notice on the page with this information and how long it will take.

Help content providers connect with your audience

Maybe your site includes videos that other people upload, such as videos from political campaigns that might be part of an online voter guide. If you have to manage videos like those, make sure the providers also include the captions, transcript, or descriptions needed.

If you don’t control the media that others upload, help any visitors understand who does control it:

  • Add a statement that explains who is responsible for the content. You probably want to do this through a footer on each video page that has a link to the content provider’s website.
  • Make sure you have contact information for each person or organization who uploads content. Ideally, the contact is a general one rather than a specific person whose email might not work in the future. You need email and phone number.
  • Create an agreement that the person uploading must at least click through to upload their video. Make sure that this includes an acknowledgement that yours is a government site and that they are responsible for the accessibility of the materials they post.

Resources

Services

We don’t endorse products, but there are a couple of great services that you should know about:

  • Amara, a tool for generating subtitles. You can use this tool yourself for free, or get help from them with your project for a fee.
  • WGBH Web Access Group – WGBH is a Boston-area public television station that offers closed captioning services

This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.

1 Comment

  1. August 1, 2019 by Dennis Sanchez

    I thought it was interesting that you mentioned that it is important to have a script prepared for a video to help with captioning the video. I think it’s cool that technology has advanced enough that a lot of internet content can be made accessible for people with disabilities. I’m curious about what other methods are used to help these people. https://vpat-compliant.com/WCAG-508-Compliance