Video Accessibility: Reach Everyone With Your Message
Why Accessible Video Matters
We believe video is one of the most powerful ways to communicate, from internal briefings and public communications, to marketing, training and events. But when your videos aren’t accessible, a significant part of your audience can’t engage with your message. That’s not just a missed opportunity, in many contexts it’s non-compliant and creates risk.
Accessible video means everyone, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or low vision, neurodivergent, english as a second language or accessing content in different ways, can fully understand and use your video content. This is essential for inclusion, compliance and effective communication.
Who Benefits from Accessible Video?
Accessible video isn’t just for audiences with disability, it benefits everyone:
- People who need captions due to hearing loss, language learning or noisy environments
- People who rely on audio description because they can’t see the screen
- Users who prefer reading or need to reference content via text
- Teams and organisations that are serious about inclusion, equity and compliance
In short: accessible video expands your reach, improves engagement and aligns with best-practice communication standards.
What are the legal requirements?
In order to adhere to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and WCAG 2.2 compliancy standards, videos must be remediated to give the viewer access to an audio description version with a few additional features they can access or turn on as needed.
To make a video accessible, there are three key components that are required.
Components of Accessible Video
Captions
A text version of everything that is presented in the audio
Audio Descriptions
An audio version of everything that is presented on the screen
Transcript
A text document containing all the audio and visual content
Captions
Videos are often as much about what is heard as it is about what is seen. Whether the video focuses on instructions for installing a car part, reporting the news of the day, or even presenting a nature documentary; the audio provides an important layer that visuals alone cannot provide… unless you have captions of course!
We live busy lives, our attention is often split and the reality is that having the ability to read and/or hear the same thing gives more opportunities for people to absorb the message they are consuming. For some people, captions are not an optional extra, but instead becomes the only way of accessing audio content - making it that much more important to get right the first time.
Ask us about captions to find out how quick and easy it is to reach a wider audience with your video content.
Difference between Captions and Subtitles
Captions provide a text version of all of the sound-based information in a video, displayed concurrently with the sounds occurring. This includes non-speech elements like music, environmental sounds and changes in tone. They will also often identify speakers if multiple voices could be heard together.
Subtitles were designed for translating audio into other languages, and will only contain speech elements. Videos that contain captions in their native language will often only contain subtitles for other supported languages. While captions are better than no captions, they do not provide the full story for a user relying only on them in place of audio.
Captions in Action
Audio Descriptions
Likewise, video is often as much about what is seen as it is about what is heard. This is, after all, the reason The Buggles were so concerned about it killing the radio star (or so the song goes)!
Videos can be used for all kinds of reasons, with many accompanying the viewer doing another activity where their attention could be divided. For example, tutorial videos often involve taking in information and pausing before the viewer performs the action themselves. Being able to gain all the necessary information from the tutorial without shifting focus from the task could significantly improve the effectiveness of the tutorial.
If the visual component is so vital to video, would it not also be vital to have a description of these visuals for those who are unable to access them?
What are Audio Descriptions (AD)
Audio description is a sound-based outline of what is happening on a screen in a particular scene or still image. It will often be available as a separate or accompanying audio track that will insert descriptions into gaps in the 'standard' audio track.
Audio descriptions can be as detailed or as simplistic as the content creator deems to be necessary to tell their story. For a speech, there may be a description of the person behind a lectern (which could note their outfit if it was important information) and only include other major visual changes, such as strong gestures or change in speaker. Descriptions of a wildlife documentary are going to be significantly more detailed, as the visual would normally carry the meaning.
Audio Descriptions in Action
Transcripts
Video holds the crown for the richest accessible experience, but text content is the undisputed champion of versatility. Text content can be manipulated in every way imaginable to meet the needs of a particular user. Need another language? Translate it. Having trouble seeing it? Make it bigger. Want to put it somewhere else? Copy it to your hearts content!
People learn differently, consume differently, and have different needs and desires. Being able to take everything said and shown in a video, and convert it to a text based format to be edited or used in another way gives control to the audience. Transcripts make the perfect notes also to highlight key concepts or note reference points to review in the video.
Use Our Video Remediation Tool
We’ve developed an affordable video accessibility tool that allows you to remediate your own content — quickly and confidently.
At just $1 per minute of video, you only pay for what you need.
The tool:
- Automatically generates accurate captions
- Allows you to add your own audio descriptions
- Exports a full transcript
- Improves over time — the more you use it, the smarter it becomes
We originally built this tool to solve accessibility challenges in learning environments. But accessible video isn’t just about education — it’s essential for corporate communications, government messaging, marketing content, internal briefings, and public information.
That’s why we’ve opened it up for everyone.
Take Control of Your Video Compliance
If you’re a content creator, communications manager, or digital team responsible for video content, this tool gives you the ability to:
- Improve accessibility
- Support WCAG 2.2 AA compliance
- Reduce risk
- Remediate content efficiently and cost-effectively
Simply register and you’ll be up and running able to start making your videos accessible straight away.
Need Support?
We’re Here to Help.
If you’d prefer guidance, have complex content, or just want to understand what’s required to meet accessibility standards, we can help.
We offer:
- Video accessibility audits: understand what needs to be fixed to meet WCAG 2.2 AA
- Team training: learn how to use the tool effectively
- Audio description training: practical guidance on writing meaningful descriptions
- Strategic advice: improve how your videos are structured and presented to maximise clarity and inclusion
Accessible video isn’t just about compliance, it’s about ensuring your message reaches everyone.
How can I learn more?
Our track record
Before we added our video tool to Meet Aandi, this business started off specialising in document accessibility. At the time we were called TaggedPDF in Australia and while we have clients who still know us by this name, our products have expanded.
TaggedPDF was established in 2010 to help Australian government organisations and businesses to meet their newly mandated accessibility requirements and transition towards WCAG 2.2 AA compliance under the National Transition Strategy (NTS) towards December 2014 and beyond, and then with the Digital Service Standard (DSS) from 2015 onwards.
We have remediated millions of pages since then for clients all over the world. We work with the creators of content also as many times the digital documents sent through have not been designed with accessibility in mind. This is the partnership we have with our clients as we won’t just remediate a document without discussing how together we can make it 100% accessible and compliant. We see ourselves as the trainers working with the clients to make a difference to the audiences they reach.
We now also do this for video. We want to enable you the content creators to create and remediate your videos for accessibility. We are here to help you as much as you need it with consulting, training or we can also do the work for you if needed.
Want to find our more about videos?
Meet Aandi provides consulting services and training for those presenting to camera
on how to make your communications more accessible.