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School of Medicine IT

Video

Video content must meet accessibility requirements to ensure all users, including those with disabilities, can understand and interact with the information presented. This page highlights the essential accessibility practices for video on School of Medicine websites. For information on video hosting options and detailed steps on embedding video, see our Video documentation in the User Guide.

“An easy way to make your content more visible and readable to search engines is to provide captions for your video.”

All prerecorded videos on UNC websites must be accessible under federal and UNC accessibility standards.

Accessibility includes:

  • Captions (required)
  • Audio descriptions (required only when visual information is not spoken)
  • Transcripts (recommended for videos; required for audio-only content)

Captions (Required)

Captions display spoken dialogue and important non-speech audio such as music, laughter, doors closing and background sound cues.

Caption Benefits

  1. Required for deaf or hard-of-hearing users
  2. Helpful in sound-sensitive environments or when users have their computers muted.
  3. Improves SEO
  4. Improve comprehension by native and foreign language speakers. A study showed 80% of people who use video captions don’t even have a hearing disability.
  5. Compensate for poor audio quality or background noise within a video.

Caption Requirements

Captions must be:

  • Accurate — machine captions must be corrected
  • Synchronized with the audio
  • Complete — no missing dialogue. Filler words like “Um” or “uh” can be omitted.
  • Descriptive — include essential sound cues (like background music, or cheering) in brackets
  • Identify speakers in brackets or parenthesis.

Machine-generated captions must be reviewed and corrected.

Captioning Support

UNC’s Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) provides:

Transcripts (Recommended for Video, Required for Audio-Only)

A transcript is a written version of everything spoken in the video. They are required for all audio-only files, like podcasts or voice recordings. They can also accompany videos because they help:

  • Search engines index your content
  • Users who prefer reading
  • Individuals on slow connections
  • Users needing to search content

Audio Descriptions (Required Only When Needed)

Add audio description when key visual content is not spoken aloud. If narration already describes what is shown, additional audio descriptions are not required.

An example video with audio descriptions can be found on the DAO website.

Lawsuit Against Harvard University

In 2015, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) filed a class-action lawsuit against Harvard University (and MIT) for allegedly violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act by failing to provide accurate and comprehensive captioning for online educational videos.

After four years of litigation, the NAD and Harvard University settled. The settlement contained specific requirements for 99 percent accuracy rate on captions.

Add a Title Attribute to an Iframe

Videos are often embed on a web page using an iframe. For accessibility reasons, you should always include a title attribute for an <iframe>. This is used by screen readers to read what the content of the iframe is. For example, the iframe code from Panopto does not include the title attribute by default so you will need to add one. Simply add title="Add your descriptive title here" to the iFrame code. Be sure you replace Add your descriptive title here, with a title that properly describes the contents of the iframe. View some example code to see how a title was added to some Panopto iframe embed code.

Continue to the Full How-To

For platform-specific instructions on embedding and managing videos, see:

How to Add Video

How to Add Captions in Panopto

How to Add Captions in YouTube

Web Accessibility Perspectives: Video Captions

47 sec.

Creating Accessible Video and Audio Content

Learn strategies for improving multimedia accessibility on your websites.
4 min. 43 sec.

Policies and Resources