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Day 12 - Video captions and audio descriptions

If you have videos embedded on your website or link to videos on a third-party website, today is your day to investigate if those videos have captions or audio descriptions.

Video captions are not only a benefit for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, anyone who may not understand the concepts, does not speak the native language of the video, and those who are in a quiet public environment and don’t have access to headphones.

Video captioning also improves comprehension and retention of information.

Two types of captions

  1. Closed captions - These are located in a separate file with the words timestamped to correlate to the video. They can be turned on/off, translated and the display can be customized.
  2. Open captions - These are part of the video and cannot be turned off.

When possible it is preferred to use closed captions, they are far more versatile for the viewer. There are situations though when open captions are needed. They are often seen on social media sites when closed captions are not part of the application (for example: Instagram stories)

Audio descriptions

Audio descriptions are commentary and narration that guides the listener through a video with concise, objective descriptions of new scenes, settings, costumes, body language, and "sight gags," all slipped in between portions of dialogue or songs.

They help someone who cannot see the video, are blind, or have low vision.

Example

Screenshot of the YouTUbe video player with captoins turned on and visible overlayed on a video playing

Screenshot of the YouTube video player with captions turned on

You will notice in the example above, capitalization and punctuation is used to ensure pauses to match way the speech is delivered.

Task

  1. Identify any pages with video embeds. Video embeds can be from popular hosting platforms, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. or they can be native <video> elements. If you don’t have any embeds, go to your video hosting platform and navigate to your channel or video list.
  2. Put your device on mute so you can’t hear any audio
  3. Turn captions on to see if they are accurate to the video
  4. If the video doesn’t have spoken word, is it possible to turn on audio descriptions?

Considerations

  • YouTube and other video hosting platforms have integrated automatic captions which get you 80% of the way there, especially if there is only one person talking at a time. They are better than nothing but that 20% incorrect content can be very embarrassing. A video doesn’t pass accessibility requirements until a human has read through the captions, corrected any errors, and re-published.
  • Most video platforms do not offer an embedded “audio descriptions” track. The next best thing would be to include a link to the audio descriptions as a text file in the description of the video. If you are embedding the video on your website, consider switching from the native hosting platform embed to Able Player.

Further resources