Accessibility Quick Tip 3: Text Equivalents for Multimedia
If possible, a text equivalent should be provided for all visual information in a website, like video, music and interactive graphics. There are several reasons why a description text should be included in a website design.
- Old browsers might not be able to display some multimedia files
- Some browsers might not have the necessary plugins and the user might not be able to update it (or might not want to)
- Impaired people could have problems interacting with multimedia
- Visually impaired people could need a text version of the multimedia file to be read by web readers
- Not every body has a high speed internet connection to download multimedia files
Why should you care? Improving usability helps everybody surfing your website, not only the impaired ones. Imagine that you trying to teach something through multimedia content, like a video; giving text explanation of what is going on in that video could improve the understanding of the idea you are trying to teach.
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The BBC makes a good job providing an advance text to tell users what’s in the video. Unfortunately the BBC does not give an explanation about the video itself, if the user is not able to play the video no content would be delivered at all.
Most Cnet News videos and photo slides have more than decent descriptions of what’s going on there.
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An image or video says a lot, but you could add much more value to that if you provide equivalent text for that media. At the end, if the user is able to see that media anyways, the text will increase the understanding of the message you are trying to deliver.
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I rightly agree to the idea of having relevant text with the media. Had a nice stay on the blog.