How to make video and audio accessible
Transcripts for video
A transcript is a text version of a video, available alongside it.
A transcript should include all the informative audio in your video. This means speech and any other important sounds that help people understand the video - just like video captions.
Transcripts can help people who:
- Have a hearing impairment
- Find text easier to understand than audio
- Don't have time to watch the video and find reading the transcript quicker
- Want to check if the video is relevant to them before watching it
A descriptive transcript is a transcript that describes the video visuals as well as the audio. Descriptive transcripts can particularly help people with vision impairments.
Example transcript
The Elective Home Education video on YouTube has an interactive transcript.
You can access the transcript by using the 'Show transcript' button in the video description.
Example descriptive transcript
The W3C video captions video is published on the W3C website.
The link below the video takes you to a descriptive transcript published in a table further down the web page.
When and how to use a transcript
Providing a transcript is an optional way to make your video more accessible.
Most video players, like YouTube, can create an interactive transcript for your video based on the captions. You must review and edit automatically generated transcripts. This is because they are usually inaccurate and incomplete.
Alternatively, you need to transcribe your audio. This means putting the informative audio into text. Follow the W3C guide on transcribing audio to text.
If you're creating a descriptive transcript, you'll need to add descriptions of the video visuals too.
If you're embedding your video on a web page, you can publish the transcript as web page text. Put the transcript, or a link to it, close to the video to make it easy to find.
