Accessible videos

Section menu

Make sure your video content is accessible

Video can be a great way to show content that can enhance the experience of a website or application.

It is now a requirement of the WCAG 2.2 standard that all new video content is as accessible as possible. Here are some things that you can do to ensure that your videos are accessible and comply with standards:

• all new videos must have captions
• make sure captions are in time with the video so users can follow them
• in addition to the captions a transcript of the video should be made available whenever possible
• use accessible colours and contrast within the video
• if there is text in the video make it easy to read
• avoid fast flashing content do not have more than three flashes within a period of 1 second, as this can cause seizures in some users
• make sure the audio on the video is at an appropriate sound level
• use an accessible video player such as the HTML5 player provided by Vimeo and Youtube
• never auto play videos when users come onto the page

Exemptions

From 23 September 2020 all video content should have captions. However there may be circumstances where this is not possible such as:

• the video is too long to caption and would not be cost effective to do so
• there are not enough resources to caption video at the time
• captioning software can have issues with the local dialect which can produce inaccurate captions; this could cause problems when the correct spelling of a medical term is essential
• live streams/webinars may not have captions but there should be a transcript if it is made available on a website at another time

As a result, manual correction of captions is required for our videos. This is one of the factors we assess when we consider our approach to developing captions and transcripts for videos.

This would be a fail on WCAG Success Criterion 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded).

Some of our older videos and live streams do not have captions. This type of video content is exempt from the regulations and we do not currently have any plans to make them accessible.

How to add captions to a video

NES currently has resources within our staff intranet which show how to add captions to a video.

The vimeo website also has instructions for uploading captions to a video on their platform.

References

Burea of internet accessibility
Checklist for accessible videos

W3.org
Understanding Success Criterion 1.2.1: Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded)