[FAQ]

Hi everyone, something has been on my mind lately.

I received a really nice comment from a viewer who is hard of hearing, and they mentioned that while they love my videos, the automatic YouTube captions are often full of errors and are difficult to follow. It honestly made me realise that I haven’t been thinking about accessibility at all.

So, aside from manually correcting all my captions from now on, what are the other things I should be doing? I’m thinking about viewers with vision impairments as well. Are there best practices for thumbnail design, like using high-contrast colours and large text? Or for how I describe things in my videos?

I want to make sure that anyone who wants to watch my content is able to. Sana you can share some tips or resources.

[Jeff Bullas]

This is an important and often-overlooked aspect of building an inclusive channel.

Short Answer: The core of accessibility lies in enhancing your standard content formats. This means providing accurate text-based captions, creating high-contrast visual formats, and using descriptive audio language.

By making deliberate choices in how you format your content, you can make your videos welcoming to a much wider audience.

You can significantly improve your channel’s accessibility by focusing on three key formats. Firstly, you need to perfect your text format by manually reviewing and correcting YouTube’s auto-captions for every video to ensure they are accurate for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Secondly, you must consider your visual formats, such as thumbnails and on-screen graphics, by using large, legible fonts and high-contrast colour schemes to assist viewers with vision impairments. Thirdly, you should enhance your audio format by practising “audio description,” which means verbally describing any critical visual information happening on screen that a person who cannot see the video would otherwise miss. Consciously improving these text, visual, and audio formats will make your content vastly more inclusive.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Author]

Posts