How to make video and audio accessible

Checklist for accessible video and audio

You must consider video and audio-only content before you create or publish it, and manually check to make sure it's accessible.

Video checks

If you work for the council, first discuss creating or using video content for online communications with the communications team.

Before you create video content, you must make sure:

background audio doesn't make it difficult to hear and understand the informative audio.
visual elements use accessible colour and avoid flashing visuals
all important visual information is narrated or audio described
you've considered which type of captions you'll need to use

You should also consider if your specific audience will need separate descriptive transcripts for your video, though this is not required in most cases.

Captions

Pre-recorded videos must have accurate captions to be accessible.

Live video is exempt from having captions under accessibility regulations, but we recommend adding them where possible.

If the live stream is recorded and stored for later access, it's considered pre-recorded and is not exempt from having captions.

The type of caption added (closed or open) will depend on platform and how the video is used.

Because YouTube supports closed captions, we recommend all videos published on our channel use closed captions instead of open captions.

Open or 'burned-in' captions should only be used where closed captioning is not supported by the platform hosting the video. You may need to create a separate video with open captions for these cases.

Learn more about closed and open captions

Adding videos to our YouTube channel

We host videos for our websites on our YouTube channel.

We've chosen this platform because we believe it's the most accessible video format for many of our users.

Videos on our YouTube channel can have their visibility set in three ways:

Public: These videos are open to the general public and visible by search engines or YouTube search.
Unlisted: These videos do not appear in search results, but you can share these videos if you have the link (ideal for emailing videos or linking to videos from webpages).
Private: These videos are locked down and creators must manually share the video with each intended viewer (not recommended).

All videos on our channel must also have accurate video captions added to be accessible.

Video description

You should also provide us with short 1 to 2 sentence description explaining what your video is about.

You can also include a list of important chapters with time stamps to put in the description for longer videos. For example, '00:00 - Intro, 03:50 - Agenda Items 15:20 - Meeting Start'.

To request a video be uploaded to our channel and transcripts provided for captions, contact the communications team.

Audio-only checks

If you work for the council, you should first discuss creating or using audio-only content on our websites with the communications team.

Before you create or publish audio-only content, like a recording of a speech or a podcast, make sure:

background audio doesn't make it difficult to hear and understand the informative audio
it has a text transcript (required)
the transcript is provided alongside or underneath the audio file, on the same page or linked to a separate transcript page

Learn more about providing transcripts for audio-only content