Hi this is Jessica with TinyFrog Technologies and today I’d like to talk about web accessibility tips for videos on your website. So, web accessibility refers to making sure all of the content on your website is accessible and easy to navigate and read for all different visitors. And there’s certain standards that apply to video content on your site.
One popular type of video that you may have is a hero video on your home page where it’s set up as a background video playing when visitors visit the site. Now for a decorative video like this, it typically doesn’t have any audio or sound playing and you don’t need captions on that type of video on the site.
But for the rest of the video content where you are typically trying to communicate something to a visitor, you’ll want to make sure the video has captions or subtitles added to it. So oftentimes, we’ll see clients post video blogs or embed a video in a certain section of the site. And it’s really important for accessibility that you have captions available for visitors to turn on.
Now, the best way to do this is to upload the video to a platform like YouTube or Vimeo because both YouTube and Vimeo offer an automatic captioning service where they’ll add captions based on the content in the video. And once this feature is turned on and the video is embedded on your site, the captions will also be available when someone comes to the site and decides to watch the video.
Turning on captions and even customizing them a bit is a really great practice in general because some visitors come to the site and they’ll have the audio turned off on their phone or desktop computer. The captions can help them enjoy and engage with the content even if they don’t want to turn on the audio on their device.
If you have any questions about adding video to your site or creating an ADA compliant website, definitely reach out to our team.
