Video and Audio Accessibility

Best Practices for Using Multimedia in Your Online Course

Using multimedia (e.g., videos, podcasts) in your online course is a great way to engage students by presenting information in a different format. When creating and adding multimedia to your course, you should ensure that it will be accessible to all of your students. A few considerations are listed below:

  • Utilize file types that will be accessible on various devices (e.g., mobile, Mac OS, Windows OS).
  • Utilize multimedia that provides player controls (e.g., pause, go back to previous content, make content full screen).
  • Provide accurate captions for videos.
    • The goal of multimedia captions is to make content easily readable and timed for comprehension when audio content cannot be heard. Automatic captions are typically only 75 – 80% accurate and have not been edited for grammar, punctuation, or time synchronization.
  • Provide accurate transcripts for podcasts or audio files.

Captioning & Transcript Resources