Video for everyone
Your career, and life, moves fast. One minute you’re amazed someone is actually paying you to do what you love doing, the next you’re a business owner with clients around the world. And somewhere along the line, you wake up to the fact you’re not just getting paid to cut footage and move keyframes anymore. The content you produce, no matter the context, actually comes with real responsibility. I don’t just mean in terms of delivering quality and value to our clients, although that’s obviously massively important to us, I mean the responsibility we have to the whole audience of that content.
Following on from our training sessions with AbilityNet the phrase “Design that works for everyone” really stood out. As a content producer of any kind your responsibility above all else is to everyone and not just your client. If someone with a permanent or temporary disability of any kind struggles to or fails to access content that you have produced, or is unable to fully understand the message of that content due to the way it has been created, then you've not only let them down, but you've also missed an opportunity to communicate your message to them.
The challenge for the industry, I think, is to find the best ways of balancing creativity with accessibility. Not to see accessibility as a creative limitation, simply a new and improved set of rules.
For marketers I believe this means feeling comfortable challenging content creators to be alert to the many factors of accessibility, pushing for the outcome that will be best for everyone and having high expectations for an accessibility first approach to deliverables. But, on a practical level, also being aware of how the additional deliverables required to improve accessibility may impact workload and subsequently budget. An example of this might be an animation that for budget reasons doesn’t use a voice over, and instead uses a text based approach. Imagine that video is played at a conference, and that someone who is visually impaired is in the audience. What are they going to gain from that video? Perhaps nothing more than a quirky music track. This isn’t to say that every video from this point on must only use a voice over, but these are the questions we need to be asking ourselves when we start any video project, right?
For content creators we simply have to wise up to the clear and practical information that is widely available surrounding accessibility. There may be things you’ve always known and done as standard, like contrast ratios for example, but there may be others that you only supply to your clients when asked, like captions. The task is to iron out those processes, make them known to your clients as a clear consideration in your approach, and embrace the many tools available for creating accessible content.
Essentially this is a shared responsibility. It may take more time, be more challenging, and may sometimes require more iterations to reach the gold standard of accessibility, but we need to afford everyone this time.
At Yard B I fully admit we have plenty of learning still to do. But, we're fully committed to educating ourselves, making the necessary changes to the way we create and deliver content, and providing the relevant guidance to our clients.
At Yard B we help forward-thinking organisations launch products, raise awareness and engage their teams with thoughtful, accessible video content. If you’ve got a vision to share or want to join our team get in touch, we'd love to chat!
