Video Accessibility: The Importance of Reaching Every Viewer

Many people experience vision problems. Consequently, making videos accessible is a necessary, ethical, and thoughtful consideration. It’s also a strategic move, and in some cases, a legal requirement. Video content is an essential marketing tactic that can significantly impact conversion rates compared to other marketing strategies. These factors are why over 90% of businesses include videos in their marketing. 

Incorporating accessible features is an effective way to make your videos stand out from the crowd, but don’t worry, making accessible video content doesn’t have to take up your time or money. We will share everything you need to know about the benefits of video accessibility, why it’s important for your business, and how to make your videos more accessible through features like transcription, captions, and more.

What Is Video Accessibility?

Video accessibility involves making videos, films, television shows, and other media forms more accessible for individuals with visual or hearing disabilities. The aim is to guarantee that all people can access the content without barriers, regardless of their capabilities. This fosters social and cultural inclusion, allowing more people to access resources and information equally. Video accessibility benefits people with disabilities by enhancing their ability to access and understand media content. These include deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, blind or low-vision users, and people with cognitive or neurological disabilities. 

How do accessible videos work? Closed captions or subtitles allow those who are deaf or have hearing loss to read and understand the videos they’re consuming. These features can also help people with conditions like dementia or ADHD who have trouble following rapid speech or complex narratives. Enabling video accessibility shows you care about inclusivity, while also providing protection from legal consequences.

What Are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?

There are laws that enforce accessibility and ensure web content is consumable for everyone. Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for web accessibility. 

WCAG provides concrete guidelines and defined criteria that content can be measured against to determine conformance levels. Its aim is to ensure there are no barriers of any kind to media accessibility. Using WCAG as a guide helps ensure online media meet ADA compliance for videos. 

The WCAG categorize the accessibility level of video content in three ways:

• Level A: This is the basic level of accessibility. Following these guidelines makes content perceivable, operable, and understandable by many users with disabilities. Any website that doesn’t meet this standard has accessibility issues, as it’s the minimum for conformance.
• Level AA:  Meeting this level improves accessibility and usability for people with more severe disabilities. It addresses issues like proper use of color and adjustable timeout settings that benefit low-vision and mobility-impaired users. It has higher standards than level A and is commonly used in court as a reference for web accessibility. 
• Level AAA:  This is the highest and most stringent level. AAA success criteria include tackling obstacles for individuals with more profound limitations. Ensuring compatible operation with assistive technologies falls under this category. Content conforming at this level is difficult to achieve as fully testing all success criteria is an intensive process that requires specialized tools and expertise.

4 Reasons to Publish Accessible Video Content

Despite a significant number of people with disabilities, as of 2022, only 3% of digital media is accessible to them. Most business owners still don’t know how to make their websites accessible or are even required to do so under disability laws.

In reality, publishing accessible video content has many benefits and is essential for everyone, regardless of their disabilities. The following are reasons you should remove barriers and enable users to engage with your videos.

1. Improve Accessibility

Consider incorporating accessibility into your content to improve usability. Accessible content is user-friendly for everyone; its benefits aren’t limited to those with disabilities. Accessible media empowers people with disabilities to access education, news, and services independently. Features like captions, audio descriptions, and sign language make videos usable for deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, and print-impaired people.

The same features allow video consumption in public places like libraries, airports, or offices without disturbing others. Transcripts help with searching and bookmarking and improve the findability of video content. Users can also pause and resume watching more easily.

2. Wider Reach

People with disabilities represent a sizable market. The World Health Organization estimates this number to be 16% of the world population or 1.3 billion people. With accessible content, you can engage this demographic.

People with disabilities are an untapped market as many businesses, unfortunately, overlook accessibility needs, leaving opportunities to meet unmet demands. You can incorporate features like captions and sign language to allow content to reach global audiences in their preferred language.

3. Better Brand Reputation

Prioritizing media content accessibility shows that you value inclusion and diversity. This will strongly resonate with your audience, giving your brand a competitive edge. People with disabilities and their families and friends will feel the brand understands and respects their needs, which could lead to them becoming loyal customers.

Since few brands truly meet accessibility standards, it will set you apart as inclusive and customer-centric. The positive press and reviews from accessibility advocates will strengthen perceptions of your brand. Meeting ADA compliance also protects your brand’s reputation as a lawful operator.

4. Improve SEO

Accessibility enhances user experience and engagement. This positively impacts key metrics like dwell time (the length of time users spend on-site), which many SEO experts claim is a ranking factor for search engines. Major search engines reward accessibility compliance and efforts, viewing it as best practice for a quality user experience.

Using accessibility features such as descriptive tags and transcripts optimizes relevant keywords, phrases, and topics search engines look for. Additionally, accessible video content creates more backlinking opportunities, as other relevant sites may be more likely to link to transcripts/captions pages. Make your content accessible and reap higher conversion rates.

How to Make Accessible Videos

Accessibility video features help ensure that people with disabilities can enjoy and understand content as fully as others. Implementing these essential features allows your enriching video content to reach that broader audience. 

Transcribe Your Videos

Provide transcripts for your videos to allow deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals full access to all audio information via text. Transcripts are also helpful for people who struggle to keep up with captions or are not fluent in the language.

Transcripts provide equal access by allowing people with disabilities and technological limitations to access information in a video. When you make a transcript for a video, it’s important to sync the words in the transcript with the exact cadence they are said in the audio. This way, users find it easy to navigate. 

Transcribing doesn’t have to cost a lot of time and money. With our YouTube Transcript Generator, you can transcribe your videos accurately and quickly in different languages and serve larger audiences in no time.

Provide Closed Captions

Having transcripts for your videos is a great first step but providing closed captions is vital to accessibility as well. Making captions for a video involves taking the words from the transcript and breaking them up into caption frames. Each frame synchronizes with the specific time it should appear on the screen to match the audio.

The captions depict every sound in the audio, including speech, effects, and off-camera noise. This helps deaf and hard-of-hearing people understand everything in a video just by reading. Captions are also a legal requirement and a necessary feature for making videos accessible.

Consider Video Design 

Video design refers to the visual look and stylistic elements you can implement in video content to make it aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly. Key aspects of video design include fonts, colors, layout, typography, and graphics.

Text and images need high contrast with backgrounds for visibility, especially in captions. Different colors also establish certain emotions, like excitement, calmness, and suspense, which engage the audience. Interestingly, colors psychologically affect purchasing decisions and influence up to 90% of first impressions. 

Using graphics also reinforces the message concepts in video content. Logos identify the source or topic of the video, while illustrations and diagrams visually represent data in a clear format. 

Add Descriptions of Visual Information

Descriptions of visual information in videos act as “audio captions.” They speak aloud contextual details and depictions of visual narratives and graphical elements to improve accessibility. Through visual descriptions, wider audiences can access video content, including those who are blind, have low vision, are deaf-blind, or have print disabilities.

Descriptions are also helpful for people with learning and cognitive disabilities. Descriptions help users visualize settings, scenes, locations, characters, appearances, facial expressions, gestures, and other non-verbal communication. They also explain visual information one may not understand from the audio, like graphics, text, diagrams, data displays, and videos within videos. Descriptions make the videos more interesting and improve the viewer experience.

Use a Media Player That Supports Accessibility 

Look for players that make it easy to add, edit, style, and time sync captions. This will help promote equal access to communication, education, and participation by including diverse accessibility needs. It’s important that users can operate all controls of the video player, such as play, pause, rewind, etc., using only a keyboard.

The volume controls should also be keyboard accessible so hearing-impaired users can adjust it independently of video playback. The same goes for turning captions or audio descriptions on and off — both mouse-only and keyboard-only options must be provided for flexibility of access.

If video auto-plays, there should be a large pause button or another easy way to stop it immediately for anyone with data limits, bandwidth issues, or cognitive barriers.

Enhance Your Video Accessibility with Sonix

Video accessibility is a revolutionary way to include more people in video content consumption. Don’t let a large group of people miss important moments from your videos. With a Sonix transcript, you can search for any quote from your files in seconds. You can also capture discussions, lectures, interviews, and more for easy retrieval later.

At Sonix, we generate transcripts in 40+ languages so that anyone can turn on captions in their native tongue. Boost your reach on YouTube and social media when you transcribe video to text no matter the format — it works for mp4, avi, mov, mpeg, and any other video file formats.

You don’t even need software to store the transcribed data, as you can store it on the cloud and access it anytime from anywhere. Contact us at Sonix today, and let our team of experts help you reach the masses and close the gap on inclusivity.