Accessibility for Media

Media

Movies & Audio

Both hearing impaired and limited English proficiency website visitors can benefit from including captions with audio and video media on websites. The easiest way to include captions with your videos is by hosting the videos on YouTube, which provides easy to use captioning tools. Unfortunately, at this time we discourage the use of any other video hosting solutions, as support for captioning can be limited.

One easy way to add subtitles to your videos is to use the DIVX Media Subtitler. After you've downloaded the software, check out the helpful instructional video prepared by the Lane Library on how to use the software for captioning your videos:

For audio files, you should include a link to the audio transcribed as a text document.

Images

Never use an image in place of text.

Pictures should always include an "alt" tag, which provides a description of what's happening in the picture. These tags are often read by screen readers to help seeing impaired people understand what's in the picture. Additionally, if a picture cannot be found, the alt text will be shown in its place.

Do not simply replicate the body text or image caption as your image alt tag. If your text says "To the right you'll find a picture of our 123 team", and then your alt tag is "image of 123 team", and your caption is "The 123 Team", you've done nothing but make a screen reader read the same text three times. In that circumstance, it'd be appropriate to set the alt tag as "", meaning that the caption or body text provides sufficient description. Alternatively, you could use an alt tag like "The team, showing Ty at the left, giving bunny ears to Mary, on the right", which would provide a description that isn't in the caption or body text.

Pictures without proper alt tags may be subject to removal.

Also see Image Use for further information about images on the Lane website.