Accessibility: Multimedia and interactivity
This section contains some general guidelines on making multimedia and interactive products accessible.
Offer alternative ways of reaching content
Multimedia products can be valuable in a learning context. They can bring difficult concepts to life and make the content more accessible to a wider audience. However, difficulties arise when only audiovisual materials are offered with no alternative.
The key point is to offer the user a choice of ways of reaching the content. Allocate time and money in project budgets to provide transcripts of speech or explanations of what's being shown in multimedia clips and make it obvious to the user where transcripts are available.
Provide transcripts and captions
If a project uses multimedia assets, for example audio and video clips of people speaking, or something being demonstrated with an animation, produce text transcripts that convey equivalent content. Where possible produce subtitles/closed captioning of video/audio and offer these as alternatives. More about transcripts and captions.
Allow the user to control which content is delivered
If the content contains video animations that loop indefinitely, provide a way for the user to pause or stop the motion, as animation can be distracting to someone using a magnifier.
It is very important in learning environments for the user to be able to control the pace at which the content is delivered. For material such as a linear sequence of slides it is better to give the user controls to move through the presentation rather than having the pages automatically flip after a set time period. If you do use timers, give the user preferences to be able to adjust the time period.
Avoid flashing graphics and strobe effects
Avoid using stroboscope effects or graphics that flash rapidly, as in some rare cases this can trigger fits in those with epilepsy.
Ensure good colour contrast
Just as with desktop products or HTML web pages, make sure the colour scheme has good contrast between foreground text and backgrounds, that elements are clearly labelled, that you can use the object with keyboard commands, and that you can tab between fields, etc.
Make sure interactive activities can be navigated using the keyboard
One form of interaction that causes many problems is relying on a mouse to do 'drag and drop' type operations. Make sure elements can be selected with the keyboard and can be moved with the cursor keys. Make sure that if there is visual feedback triggered by the mouse, this is also given keyboard equivalents.
Documents, video and audio
Find detailed information on preparing documents, videos and audio for the web in our main Multimedia section.