“Easy” is such a dangerous approach to take. You see a lot of articles along the lines of “7 easy ways to improve accessibility” — they always comment on alt attributes and never mention captioning or transcription. Technically, it’s not significantly more difficult to add alt attributes than to add transcription, but the scope of work is much greater. People are lazy, and it makes for unfortunate compromises.

I appreciate your comment! Since this article is almost three years old, I suspect that Abdulrehman won’t be reading your advice, but I’m always glad to re-visit past articles.

Great post. I especially loved this part:

A lack of technological awareness is part of the problem: but I think that the greater issue is a lack of social awareness.

Exactly! As a deaf person, I feel annoyed when I attend workshops on accessibility, and web specialists love repeating about how to add “alt” attributes to images, but a very few if any ever think about providing transcripts and captions for audio components of videos and podcasts. I raise my hand every time they talk about how “fully accessible” their websites are except for that media. They whine how expensive it is to add transcripts or embed captions. I disagree. As long as they have that social awareness that you had explained about, they would find effective ways to implement those technical solutions.

After all, the concept of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” would apply there. If web owners stop complaining about how “expensive” it is to provide text alternatives, they may invest some money in the beginning, but in the long run they would benefit much more from that by improving their site’s search indexing. Also, if the site has a lot of long videos and audio, transcripts would definitely make it easier for any users to control the speed of reading the written information.

To Abdulrehman:

To let you know, the word “handicapped” is no longer used in descriptions about people with disabilities. Please be careful when choosing words. Some words may offend us. We do not like to perceive ourselves as weak and deserve to be respected. There’s a concept called “people first language” that describes us as people first, not our disabilities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language

Please research more on proper terminology.

Moreover, if you keep the handicapped people aside videos are in a way more easy for both reader and blogger(in case of a blog). Although we need to think more on this topic.

Regardless of the obvious problem with this statement - the assumption that it is in any way acceptable to decide to “leave out” disabled populations - I have to take issue with the idea that videos are easier for both reader and blogger. They may absolutely be easier for some readers or bloggers, but to state that they’re easier for all is patently absurd.

Speaking for myself, I will generally NOT choose to watch a video if there is a text equivalent available. I simply don’t have the time to waste on video when I can get the information in text.

I do agree when you say the deaf will not be able to hear but putting in subtitles would be a good enough to constitute that. Moreover, if you keep the handicapped people aside videos are in a way more easy for both reader and blogger(in case of a blog). Although we need to think more on this topic.

Creating accessible content, once you’ve gone beyond plain HTML text, is a much more time consuming process — - and, specifically, it’s always going to be time consuming. You don’t learn how to do it then find it easy, because it’s not replacing a previous task. Making multimedia content accessible is an additive task to the other processes of content creation.

Thanks, Adrian!

So we know people are kind of lazy, and though they may come out with things like ‘oh blind people aren’t our audience’ or whatever, but that’s mainly trying to justify the fact that they don’t want to add extra time and complexity to the process of adding video to a web site.

I think there’s a lot more chance of getting people to use accessible HTML code than there is to get them to create accessible content all the time.