Multimedia
Multimedia is anything that uses audio and video. It’s important to provide ways for everyone to consume that media.
Best Practices
- Auto-play: Don’t auto-play videos and audio. People using screen readers navigate by listening, so any sound playing when the page loads will interfere with their experience. Audio or video should only be initiated by an action taken by the user. If your web page does automatically play audio for more than 3 seconds, provide a mechanism to pause or stop the audio.
- Closed captioning and descriptions: Provide captions or transcripts for audio and video. Anything said in multimedia must be said in the captioning, and vice versa. Any information displayed solely visually should also be available in audio or text form.
- Timestamping and keyboard: All video controls should be accessible via the keyboard, including time stamp information.
- Alerts: Don’t rely on sounds to convey information, like an “alert” noise. Even users who have good hearing often have their computers muted.