How to make video and audio accessible

Checklist for accessible video and audio

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

Before you create or publish video content, make sure:

background audio doesn't make it difficult to hear and understand the informative audio.
text and informative images use accessible colour
there are no flashing visuals - if there is, they should not have more than three flashes per second
you provide basic transcripts as a separate file if needed for your specific audience (this is not required)
you consider if open captions are needed or not

Pre-recorded or live video must have captions. When and how captions are added may depend on platform and how the video will be used.

As standard, we recommend all videos have closed, not open, captions available.

Open or 'burned-in' captions should only be used in cases where closed captioning is not supported by the video's hosting platform.

Videos added to YouTube support closed captioning, so should contain separate open captions in most cases.

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 be 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).

Create a script that includes a visual description of what's happening on screen - use this to narrate or audio describe the video.
Request the video be uploaded to our council's YouTube channel - this generates closed caption text automatically you can use for video captions and transcripts.
Request a text file copy of the automatic captions (with time stamps included).
Let us know if the auto-captions are accurate - if not, correct the text and add any important visual cues like titles or images of text, then send the text file back to us to update on your video.
Add chapters to longer videos by sending us a list of chapter time stamps, for example, 00:00 - Intro, 03:50 - Agenda Items 15:20 - Meeting Start
If needed, create a separate text-based transcript using the following steps:
1. Use the captions text file to make paragraphs, add headings, label speakers and include essential missing audio in square brackets, like [laughter].
2. Remove time stamps - though you may want to include some time stamps for longer videos to help users refers to the video.
3. Save the text transcript as an accessible Word or PDF document file.
4. Upload the transcript to our website and link to it along side the video content.

YouTube's auto captioning text is not considered a full transcript for accessibility purposes. This is because it:

does not contain visual only titles and important information others get from watching the video
does not include any information that is not audio described, like slides with text in a silent video
are inaccurate because audio is hard to understand, like with heavy accents
are not the same as providing a separate basic transcript.

A separate basic transcript:

does not require the user to interact with the video player
provides access to your video content in a different format and medium
describe titles and important visual cues that others get from watching the video, like slides with text

Before you publish audio-only content, make sure:

background audio doesn't make it difficult to hear and understand the informative audio
pre-recorded audio-only content has a transcript (this is required)
the transcript is provided alongside or underneath the audio file on the same page or there is a link to a separate transcript page

If you have an issue with video or audio content that's not covered in this guidance, you can contact the Communications team for advice.