Why make videos accessible?

It’s both a human right and a government mandate to make videos accessible to disabled people. Accessible videos improve usability for everyone and are more likely to appear in search results.

See the latest guidance on making videos accessible

For more comprehensive guidance on this topic, see:

Recognised as a basic human right

Find out why the accessibility of information for everyone is a human right.

Required by the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard

You need to meet the requirements for videos in the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard.

Improves usability and search engine optimisation (SEO)

If you add a descriptive transcript, it makes the important topics and keywords in your video easier and faster to find, scan and listen to, enabling video content to be:

  • indexed by search engines
  • searched by end users
  • translated into a foreign language (creating a transcript is the first step)
  • played out loud to people using assistive technology at a rate much faster than most humans speak — in the same way a sighted and hearing person might watch and listen to a video at a faster playback speed. 

Useful to everyone

Accessible videos make video content more accessible to everyone, not just disabled people. For example, captions and transcripts are useful to people who:

  • have problems streaming the video
  • want to watch the content silently
  • prefer to scan the content rather than watch the entire video
  • are not native speakers of English.

Utility links and page information

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