Creating Accessible Content for Multimedia

Hello everyone, and welcome back to able spectrum. This is our latest video, this time on creating accessible content for multimedia. My name is Chris King, today we’ll explore why accessibility matters and how you can make your content more inclusive foreign.

Now to recap a little bit of what we spoke about in the last video, back then, we talked about four key principles of WCAG, and if you can remember what they are, they are, P, o, u, r, poor, Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and robust. And just to remind you, perceivable has to do with our senses, so sight, hearing and touch, in most cases, operable O has to do with how you interact with the document or web page, such as with a mouse or with a keyboard or some assistive technology, understandable the third one has to do with the degree to which your content can be understood. The fourth one is robust. Robust has to do with the technologies used to display your content, whether it’s an iPhone, whether it’s an iMac or a PC or an HP, or some piece of assistive technology, whatever the device is using to display and communicate your content.

Okay, so now getting into the purpose of this video, we’re going to look at the six things you can do to make your content more accessible, and they are descriptive headings, alt text for images, sufficient color contrast captions and transcripts, avoiding sensory overload and creating descriptive link text.

So the first thing you can do to create accessible content is create logical and descriptive headings. There is sort of like old school idea of chapters in a book, but they can be be applied almost anywhere in your Word document, on your web pages, and they come written as headings, usually in the Styles pane in a Microsoft Word application, also in Pages applications on the Mac and most other word processing applications, you usually have six headings. Actually, almost always most important Heading should be at the top. That’s your heading. One heading one can often be the same or similar to your document or page title. It basically describes the contents of what’s in a document. And h2 could be the top level headings or chapters. Heading Three might be a subheading. Heading four, a sub subheading, you get the idea. So you may have structured your document beforehand and you already have some headings written out, so use those. Make sure they are descriptive of the content that follows. The other thing you want to remember is don’t skip headings. Don’t go from an h1 to an h3 or an h2 to an h4 always go in logical order, unless you are going back up. So you may get to a sub, sub heading in h4 and then the chapter ends. It’s okay to go back to an h1 or an h2 so make sure your documents have descriptive headings. It’ll make it so much easier for people to find the content those who don’t have broader context, who can’t, who are who can’t look at the whole document. Also, headings can be used to populate the table of contents in your Microsoft Word document or Pages document and what have you. Very important, it’s the number one thing you can do, and it’ll make your documents way more accessible.

The next great thing you can do to make your multimedia more accessible is add alt text. Now you may have heard this alt word bandied about in design or accessibility circles, and even just in general use, even on Facebook, when you upload a picture, you can now add an alternative text. So what alt text is is basically just a description of an image you want to describe your image for people who can’t see it for the most part. So it talks about, you know, either with the details of what’s in the image or the purpose of the image, you sort of have to decide for yourself what information the image is conveying, and put that in your alt text. Alt text is short, so it shouldn’t be more than 100 Characters more or less in length. If you get into descriptions that are longer than that, they go by the name of long descriptions, good description, and they can go somewhere else in your document. Or if there is a spot for a long description, you can use that but essentially an alt text describes your image. There are two types of images. There’s decorative images or meaningful images. So decorative, obviously a bouquet of flowers that doesn’t add much value to your your your document, or doesn’t provide more information. In that case, you would just leave the alt text empty, or you wouldn’t provide an alt text. So at the beginning, you need to decide if it’s a meaningful or a decorative image.

The next thing you want to do to ensure accessible content is use descriptive link text that means, don’t use text that says, Click here. It’s a classic mistake, and it’s been used for a long time, but some people don’t have the broader context in of what’s in your document. Some people using assistive devices, may just choose to listen to a list of links on your page to find out where the content takes them, and in that case, text that says click here tells them nothing. So in order to meet this requirement, you simply have to use written text such as Amazon or able spectrum or Amazon home. So if you’re looking at a specific page within a website, you would have Amazon Home. Basically, if you use the title of the of the destination page as your link text, you’ll probably be passing this requirement. Whatever you do, don’t use click here, and probably don’t use the URL, unless you’re planning to print out a printed copy that would be clickable and you want people to know what the actual URL is.

The next thing you want to do to create your content more accessible is to ensure there is sufficient color contrast, or just contrast, in general, color contrast is used to provide sufficient contrast for those who might have some sort of vision disability. And we all know many people have those. Just look around and see all the people wearing glasses, vision is one of the more common disabilities around the world. So to ensure good color contrast, there is a ratio that is used that goes from 21 to one, which is essentially black and white, and any ratio in between that. So to ensure a minimum contrast for, let’s say, small text that is small text about 12 point font on a background, you want to make sure you have a contrast ratio of 4.5 to one. That’ll ensure sufficient contrast for people with low vision, for the most part, if you’re looking for or if you’re talking about larger text, that is 14 point point text or larger the ratio goes down to three to one. So it’s not quite as contrasty, but there’s still sufficient contrast there. The other elements you want to check are design elements or user interface elements in your document, such as, say, check boxes or radio buttons. Usually those have a similar look and feel across web browsers and applications, because they’re black and white, but maybe you’ve created your own, for example, little user interface elements. So in order to see, for example, that a check box is checked or unchecked, you need to have the three to one ratio, which is the same as the large font ratio to pass color contrast requirements for that, there’s tools available for download that are free, such as the color contrast analyzer. It’s a little app you can put on your computer. You download it, and you just click an eye dropper on the on the text, and then an eyedropper on the background, and they’ll tell you what the ratio is. Very easy to do, helps a lot of people.

So getting down our list of requirements and recommendations, the next one is captions and transcripts. Now, as we all know, video is a very popular format these days. We see them on YouTube, we see them on Tiktok, we see them on Twitter and Instagram. We see them basically everywhere. So if you want your videos to be accessible, provide captions and transcripts. Now this one was always a little bit trickier for me to get a good grasp of, so I had to dig a bit deeper. But basically, when creating video content that contains audio, make sure you have captions. That is a must. You must have captions which display on top of the video and state what is being said by the people in the video, as well as any additional relevant sounds that are. In the background.

Now there are also three types of captions, just to add a little bit of complexity, but they’re not hard to understand. You have closed captions. For some reason, they call it closed but in fact, closed captions mean you can turn on or off your captions using a button in the interface, there’s open captions, which just means the captions are burned right into the multimedia file, and they are displayed, no matter what, on top of your video. And there’s live trap captions, which are used, obviously during a live broadcast, such as a news broadcast today, most technology will automatically display in text what is being said, so less work is involved. So as mentioned, while captions live, open or closed, are presented with the video.

On top of it, transcripts are the full written text of what is spoken and what is happening in the video, either written on the web page or in an attached Word file. Now there are two situations where a transcript is required, that’s with video only content, where a transcript can be used to describe what is happening in the video or audio only content, such as a podcast, where the transcripts is actual is the only option, because there’s no video to present captions, so the transcript is the written text as as it is spoken in the podcast. The benefits of providing transcripts are that it makes video content accessible to users with hearing impairments, cognitive disabilities, or those who prefer reading over listening. Transcripts also allow for better searching of video content for search engines, and it also increases efficiency for users who simply prefer reading content over watching or listening to it. But in summary, providing both transcript and caption is highly recommended to maximize the accessibility of your video content.

Last but not least, very important, do not have sensory overload in your videos. That means flashing lights, not only can they be annoying, but they can also be very triggering for people with, say, photosensitive epilepsy, and they actually have requirements around this for accessibility, and that is, don’t have a flashing light more than three times per second in your video, that can trigger seizures in people who are susceptible to those types of things. But as you know, flashing GIFs and animated movement and stuff that happen too often or repeatedly can be very annoying. They can also be annoying for people who have attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder. So try and keep your backgrounds relatively simple or plain if you want to keep things distraction free, avoid sensory overload, and that’s the last one. So those are all the tips I have for you for creating more accessible content. It’s not a comprehensive list, but it’s a very good starting point, and by checking off those boxes, you certainly are making your content much more accessible and easy to navigate for people with disabilities or people without disabilities.

Again, just to recap those things or those tips, are creating descriptive headings using alt text for your images having sufficient color contrast in your content using captions or transcripts for videos, avoiding sensory overload and having sorry I forgot but descriptive link text. Can’t forget that one. Well, thanks for watching. My name is Chris King, and this is able spectrum. Please leave your comments in the comments section below and look forward to seeing you in the next video.

Bye for now you.