How do you put videos on websites compliant with Section 508 standards?

Basically, the term of Section 508 Standard Compliance refers to Section 508 in the Rehabilitation Act. This Act is a part of the federal law which makes it absolutely illegal for all federal agencies to be discriminating against anyone who has disabilities. This rule makes the government websites also comply with the regulations that have been put forth by the American Disabilities Act or the ADA.

What is Section 508 Act all about?

Section 508 of this Act mandates that every electronic communication or information technology system which is used in the federal government needs to be accessible to people who are either handicapped or in any way disabled. This will include every federal government computer and the websites of the federal government. It is a crucial law for computer manufacturers and web designers to follow because every computer and website that is sold to the federal government needs to be compliant with section 508 and accessible to people with a handicap.

These days, the compliance with the section 508 policies of accessibility has come under a lot of scrutinies. All the videos that are uploaded in web pages need to have captions in order to ensure that the content in them gets easily accessible to every citizen both internal and external. This shall include the people who are visually impaired or have problems of deafness or are hard of hearing. In this article, you will learn about some vital tips to help you learn how you must caption your videos in your web pages to make them compliant with Section 508.

Two types of captioning

Basically, there are two major types of captioning videos, by either using open captioning or by using closed captioning. In the open captioning, you will ensure that words remain visible always on the screen and that a viewer is not required to click on any icons in order to activate that caption. In the closed captioning, all the captions need to be hidden to the viewers and can be decoded only after they click an icon.

If you are uploading your videos on YouTube, then you can use the SRT caption file option.

In case you use Flash videos, then they will work with the Flash XML caption file.

For Windows media video, you need to use the SAMI caption file.

For DVDs, you can use the line 21 files for captioning.

You should also be aware of certain regulations to help hearing impaired people understand the thing that is communicated in the videos. You can use brackets for describing noises, for sound bites you should put the name of the speaker in capital letters at the beginning and then follow it with a colon sign, and so on.

If you want to learn more about Section 508 Standards and Compliance regulations, you must visit https://siteimprove.com/en-us/accessibility/section-508-compliance/.

Conclusion

Section 508 standards will ensure that your videos are accessible easily to disabled people also. Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will have helped you.