How To Make Audio Video Content Accessible

How to make audio and video content accessible? Now, this is the big question, right? And I

post it like this because this is much easier to understand than the opposite question:

How to test for accessible audio and video content? Basically, you look for available

features and if those features are not available, then you can say it's inaccessible. Or if all of

those features are available, then it's accessible. Let's look at user needs. There are basically

three user needs for audio and video, and they have overlapping needs as well. So the first one

is hearing. Hearing means that deaf and hard of hearing individuals have a way to consume the

audio content that is in the video or in the audio. So, you know, if you can't properly hear

what's going on, then you need an alternative for that. Then you have vision. So blind and

low vision individuals, they need alternatives for the visual content. So that's everything that is

displayed on the screen. And yeah, this is pretty obvious.

Basically, you do the same thing that you would do for images,

but for video. And we see how we do that in a minute. And then

there's cognitive, which is basically mostly people who have

issues processing information. So for some people with

cognitive disabilities, it's super hard to, to process visual and auditory information at the

same time. So for those, it's nice that if you have things like pressing pause, if you, if you

give them a way to slow down the video that can help. And sometimes it's just that they prefer

written information much more than the video. So having an alternative in written form is a good accessibility requirement there as well.