Accessibility 101: Making Video Presentations Accessible BEFORE the Session

Welcome back to Ability Central’s “Accessibility 101” series, where our team identifies and offers solutions to the most common accessibility challenges people face in the workplace.

Video presentations are an integral part of many workplaces. Multimedia, slides, images, animations, and video footage are all effective means of communication growing in popularity every day.

However, video presentations cannot be successful with a “one size fits all” approach. Many popular video presentation services forget one of the most important factors in the workplace: accessibility.

Video presentations may pose a problem to people with disabilities. Someone who is blind cannot benefit from visual cues without audio description. A coworker who is Deaf will not understand a video’s audio overlay without captions or an interpreter. And people with “invisible” disabilities, like sensory processing disabilities, neurodivergence, or intellectual/developmental disabilities (I/DD), may struggle to process information in a video for a variety of reasons.

Without the right accessibility features and procedures in place, many people with disabilities may not feel like they can speak up about their difficulties with the material. The best way to avoid an information gap between your video presentation and your audience is to plan for accessibility in advance.

In today’s Accessibility 101 guide, we break down the accessibility best practices you can apply before your video presentation to maximize engagement, communication, and understanding.

Ways to Make Video Content Accessible

Who doesn’t love showing off a shiny new video presentation? It’s tempting to add in flashy slide transitions, exciting animations, or color-coded graphs, but sometimes, these extra features can make your content harder for people with disabilities to understand.

You can improve accessibility within your video content with these best practices:

Avoid flashy visual effects. Loud colors, image collages, image carousels, and small-scale embedded videos can disrupt your communication goals.
Simplify your language. This is helpful for speakers as well as attendees. Try to avoid industry jargon, unfamiliar abbreviations, and flowery language. Clear, concise words get your point across quickly.
Prioritize color contrast. People with vision disabilities like color blindness or cataracts struggle with color contrast. When colors are too similar, it becomes difficult to read text or understand an image. For example, purple text on a blue background can be confusing due to poor color contrast. Use a free color contrast tool like Coolors to test your content.
Make sure your visual cues are necessary. Can you simplify a wall of text into a few short bullet points?
Use clear, large fonts. Text that is too small or a font that is too fancy (think cursive or handwriting-style text) can be difficult for people with visual, sensory, or intellectual/developmental disabilities to process.
Describe visual information. Image descriptions, visual captions beneath an image, or audio descriptions of visual cues can be helpful for people with vision, sensory, and processing disabilities. If you’re sending out your materials in advance, include image alt text in any still materials to improve accessibility for screen readers.

Approaches to Accessibility: Steps to Take in Advance

The best way to make a video presentation accessible is to plan for accessibility in advance. Assuming no one with a disability will view your content (or simply “winging it” when it’s time to present) is a harmful approach to workplace relationships.

Instead, try these accessibility best practices when you’re creating your video presentation, planning the viewing session, and sending out calendar invites to your team.

Assume people with disabilities will attend.

It’s a common misconception in the workplace to assume that no one on your team has a disability. Many people with disabilities choose not to disclose their disabilities in the workplace. Others may assume their disabilities are common knowledge or assume that their disability is too much of a “hassle” to bring to others’ attention.

The best way to avoid this communication gap is to assume the presence of people with disabilities at every meeting, video presentation, and town hall, especially if your team’s events are open to the public.

Offer accommodations.

Accommodations should be an automatic offering in every workplace, but it’s not always that simple to arrange them. Further, many people with disabilities may feel awkward about asking for accommodations or assume that no accommodations are available for their specific disabilities.

Accommodations you might offer for a video presentation include:

Closed captioning or live caption services
Interpreter services
Alt text on images and graphics
Audio description for visual cues
Color contrast tools for color blindness
Alternative viewing options (i.e. adding a remote session or recording your event)
Other custom resources based on the audience’s needs

Be prepared—don’t offer accommodations you won’t be able to provide.

Open clear communication.

The best way to make your video presentations feel inclusive, accessible, and welcoming for people with disabilities is to make accommodations clear. This includes sharing information beforehand about what accommodations will be available, as well as offering a clear and timely way for people to request other accommodations.

You can improve your video presentation accommodations process by:

Stating what accommodations, if any, will be available during the presentation.
Sharing a clear method to request accommodations, like contact info for the event organizer or a premade request form.
Stating the cutoff date for accessibility requests, if any.

Plan (and budget!) for assets.

Once you know what accommodations your audience needs, it’s time to make those accessibility options available. A common pitfall in these situations is not leaving yourself enough room in the budget to follow through on accommodation requests.

For example, captioning services can be expensive. Many meeting services like Zoom or video streaming platforms like YouTube offer “automatic” captioning generated by AI. However, these captions are famously poor quality, and could confuse someone instead of helping. Alternatives like live captioning services, contracting someone to create accurate video captions, or creating video captions yourself can be costly.

This applies to time as well as money: if someone asks you to hire an ASL interpreter, for example, don’t agree to this unless you have enough time to find and book a trusted provider.

Maximize the utility of your meeting invitations.

How do you plan on letting people know about your video presentation? If the presentation is for colleagues, you might send a calendar invite or an email. If the presentation is public-facing, there might be an email blast with a registration link.

Presentation invites offer accessibility opportunities. Within a calendar invitation, email, or registration page, you can ask people for accommodations requests, collect contact information, and send out resources.

Send out materials in advance.

It’s a great idea to send materials to attendees in advance, especially if you know you’ll have colleagues with disabilities attending. For example, attaching video slides, a premade transcript, or image descriptions friendly to screen readers can improve access and comprehension for coworkers with vision disabilities. Similarly, a meeting agenda can help neurodivergent people know what to expect and prepare questions or comments.

If you plan on a Q&A session during your video presentation, you can also source questions in advance. This is helpful for people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools like screen readers and text-to-speech software. Allowing people to submit questions in advance ensures audience members with disabilities will be heard. It also gives you a chance to prepare your answers before the Q&A!

Make sure your materials are accessible.

Double check that the materials you send or plan to present are accessible, too. Check YouTube videos or other multimedia to make sure captions are enabled (and high quality). Choose footage with audio descriptions, if possible.

If you’re preparing your materials in Microsoft products (like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.), use their free accessibility checker tool (in Word, you’ll find this under “Review," then “Check Accessibility”) to test your content.

You can also find free color contrast checkers online, like Coolors. These tools calculate the contrast ratio between your text and your background colors and offer scored suggestions for making your content more accessible for people who are colorblind or have low vision.

When in Doubt, Ask

Accessibility varies from person to person. What works for one colleague may not work for another. It’s important to ask people in the disability community what accommodations they need. The best way to welcome disabled people to your video content is by simply asking them what makes a positive impact in their experience.

Our best practices are not an exhaustive list. Don’t be afraid to be curious and communicative about what your team needs to succeed!

For more information on video presentations, view the next article in our Accessibility 101 series: Accessibility 101: Making Video Presentations Accessible DURING the Session.

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