Introduction
Videos are fun and engaging, but unfortunately often they aren't made accessible. You can make sure videos on your blog are accessible by adding captions, creating transcripts, and avoiding harmful flashing.
Making Captions
If you're making your own videos to post on your blog, you should include captions. They're essential for d/Deaf and hard of hearing folks, and they also help people with auditory processing disorder or conditions like ADHD. The video below both demonstrates captions in action and talks about their importance. Click the "CC" button to show the closed captions.
There are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind when writing or editing captions:
- Caption Timing: captions should be synchronized with the audio and on screen long enough to read.
- Line Division: caption lines should break in logical places.
- Number of Lines: there can be up to three lines on screen at a time, but 1 or 2 is better.
- Number of Characters per Line: lines can be up to 38 characters, but ideally 32 characters or less (including spaces).
- Accuracy: spelling, grammar, and punctuation should be correct, and the captions should be accurate to what's being said.
Tip
YouTube allows you to add captions to your videos several different ways. You can upload a caption file with timings if you choose to pay a captions vendor to make one. You can also upload the video's script and let YouTube figure out the timings of the captions automatically, editing as necessary. This is probably the best balance of cost and time for hobbyist bloggers.
Finally, YouTube does have an auto caption feature, but auto captions are not sufficient. There are often errors in the captions, and they lack capitalization and punctuation; unedited, they don't provide full access. If you don't have a script already written, auto captions can create a starting point, but it can take a lot of time to fix them.
Making Transcripts
You may wonder why a video needs a transcript if it has captions. Descriptive transcripts allow Deafblind people to use braille displays to access the content of a video, including visual information. They're also used by folks who can't watch videos easily, such as people with brain injuries who find them tiring, or people with migraines.
If you already have captions, it's relatively easy to create a transcript. One format you can use is a table, with the video's audio in one column, and descriptions of the corresponding visuals in the other column. You can check out the transcript of the video above to see what that looks like.
Avoiding Harmful Flashing
Certain types of flashing can cause seizures in photosensitive people. Be mindful of this when picking out or creating videos and animated images (like GIFs) for your blog.
In general, if the content flashes more than three times per second, is notably large (a small animating image would not cause a seizure), and has bright contrast in the flashes (especially if the color red is present), it may cause a seizure and must be avoided.