Accessible alternatives are required for all published multimedia.
Accessible Multimedia
Having accessible multimedia means we are able to reach the widest audience possible.
Captions and transcriptions help relay information within multimedia to those that may be using assistive devices, but also help non-native English speakers and allow searchable text.
To caption your video:
- Provide the caption yourself, either by manually building a subtitle file or using a third-party service such as Rev.com.
- Use services provided by Media Services (the service will be quoted when requesting your recording).
Either method should yield a file with timestamps and text of your content.
Closed captioning, also known as subtitling, is an on-screen, visual transcription of the audio portion of a video. Many video platforms, such as YouTube, offer automatic captioning, but often include errors, especially when the audio quality is low. It’s important to check and edit automatic captioning, or have your video transcribed by a professional service. Closed captions can be turned on/off in the video player, whereas open captions are burned into the video. Captions should be accurate, synchronous, complete, properly placed (not obstruct important visual information), and include speech and important sound effects.
If using open captions, the text of the captions should have at least a 4.5:1 color contrast ratio against the background. Here are some tools to check color contrast levels:
Readability is important. To ensure people can easily read open captions, keep the following factors in mind:
|
Aspect ratio of video |
Suggested font size in pixels |
Suggested character count |
Font |
|---|---|---|---|
|
16x9 widescreen |
46 pixels |
40 characters |
Avenir Next Medium |
|
9x16 vertical |
48-60 pixels |
32 characters |
Avenir Next Medium |
Transcripts are generally required for audio content such as podcasts. Much like captions, these can be manually created or provided by a third-party vendor.
YouTube Uploads
YouTube provides automatically-generated captions. These captions generally contain some errors and should be checked for accuracy. YouTube videos can be edited and corrected to yield an accessible video if you're looking to create captions yourself.