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Using video and audio

All video and audio content we produce must be accessible. This means making sure that all users can access the same content, so they are not excluded.

Including captions or transcripts helps:

  • users with hearing and cognitive impairments understand the content easily
  • users who may want to watch or listen to content in a noisy office or on public transport
  • search engines like Google and Bing find your content, this means more people access and engage with it

Video content

When you produce video content, you need to consider:

  • if the video has audio, add closed captions or the text transcript
  • if the video doesn’t have audio (for example, it includes diagrams without a verbal description) then you need to include an audio description or a detailed transcript

Audio content

Audio only content, for example a podcast or MP3 should be accompanied by a transcript.

Accessible video players

Make sure that the multimedia player is accessible for keyboard and screen reader users. They should be able to control the play/pause button and slider.

Able player is a good example of an accessible multimedia player.

Creating a transcript

You can create your own video transcript using the YouTube video editor.

To find out how to do this, check out automatic captioning on YouTube help.

If you are unable to do a transcript yourself, there are captioning and transcription services available, like 3PlayMedia, that can do this for you.

This is a paid service, so you will need to decide if it is something that you can budget for.

Using video and audio content on social media

If you share your video or audio content on social media, the following platforms allow you to add captions or a transcript.

Instagram doesn’t have the facility to add captions on the platform. There are third-party tools and services that can provide this as a paid service.