Speaker 1: YouTube content creators must be aware that viewers will experience their presentations according to the extent that they are visually and orally accessible. This video provides guidance on improving the audiovisual accessibility of YouTube content generally, and in particular for the benefit of viewers with special needs. Please note that although this video will supply some advice on developing an attractive aesthetic for your channel and content, its primary aim is to ensure your content is accessible to the widest range of people possible. This is an introductory level video, but in the description you can find a list of more detailed resources for advanced content development. First let's look at visual content. Aside from relevance to any accompanying audio, images and video which you embed into your own video should be of a size large enough for viewers to identify any pertinent details. Bear in mind how the images and video may appear when your video is viewed on a cell phone screen. It can also be a good idea to increase the saturation of images or video which were originally a little washed out to improve their visibility on smaller screens. Animation Some viewers may find animated elements, whether images, text or something else, to be distracting, irritating, or mentally or emotionally stressful. In particular, avoid rapidly flashing colours, avoid rapidly moving animation, and avoid multiple animated elements on screen simultaneously. In my earlier videos, you'll see I used kinetic typography to present the entire text of my script on screen, in large, animated type. I thought this would be an accessible way to present the script, and that the large font size would help viewers read the text more easily than subtitles. However, I received a polite comment on one of my videos advising me that they found the animated text distracting and difficult to follow, so I abandoned this approach and replaced it with my current approach of YouTube Subtitles. Recently, I've also started to think about how I could improve the presentation of the text I place in my videos, which right now is occasionally a little clunky, but I'll talk about that later in another section. The important takeaway here is that regardless of the way you want your video to appear, you should always listen to your viewers, since they're your target audience, and they're contributing their time to watch your content, an experience you should make as pleasant as possible. Colors Well-planned color schemes are a commonly overlooked feature of many YouTube videos. Most people have a specific preferred aesthetic for their channel, but it's also important to think about your aesthetic from an accessibility point of view. Later in this video, I'll talk more about aesthetics, but for now, I'd like to talk about color accessibility. When planning your color scheme, it's important to consider the purpose of your content. If you're presenting text, do you want readers to skim read it, or read it in full? For skim reading, light text on a dark background is better, but for reading in full, dark text on a light background is better. I typically present my text in a form intended to be read in full, so I need to change my text color scheme, because right now my title's a dark text on a light background, but my main text is the opposite way around. As a general rule, high contrast improves visual accessibility. The strongest contrast is obviously black on white, or white on black. However, for most users, very strong contrast can cause eye strain, and is best avoided. Therefore users with weaker vision, the stronger the contrast, the better. Obviously you can't design perfectly for both of these groups at the same time, but an optimal combination would be a background which is 85-95% of the original color, with text which is 90-100% of the original color. It's also important to consider the needs of color blind and color confused viewers. Generally this is achievable by simply avoiding specific color combinations, and by ensuring you don't use typically confused or unrecognized colors for color critical tasks, such as communicating meaning through specific colors. In the video description, I've placed a link to a page explaining best practice for taking into account color blind and color confused viewers. There are a number of free sites online which will help you check various color combinations for their conformity to the official Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and some of those sites will help you build an entire color palette for your website or YouTube channel. I've provided links to some of them in the video description. Text typeface is another important concern. This can be a headache for most online content, because there's no guarantee that the typeface you're using will be installed on your viewers' computers. However, the situation is simplified for video content creators, since your text is embedded into your video, so you only need to be concerned with typeface readability. Generally speaking, typefaces with serifs, the small ornamental or decorative elements on letters, are more readable for printed matter, whereas sans-serif fonts, which don't have these ornamental elements, are more readable for online matter. Consequently, you should be using sans-serif typefaces. See the links in the description for more detailed information. Having reviewed my own content, I've decided I need to make some text accessibility changes. Although I've used the Impact typeface quite a lot, especially for video headings and its really great for that, I've also used a couple of typefaces with serifs, such as Cetus. Recently I decided to switch to a new typeface for my main text. I've chosen Lexend, a typeface freely available in a range of font sizes and weights, which has been professionally designed for accessibility, and which has been studied and tested extensively, demonstrating excellent readability across a wide spectrum of users. I've linked to it in the video description. Its size is another important consideration. Previously I've used quite a large size for the text inside my videos, partly out of concern for visually challenged people, and partly out of concern for people viewing my videos on their phones. It's always important to consider how your content will appear on a cell phone, and it's a good idea to view it on that form factor yourself to see how it looks. Having looked at my videos at different sizes on desktop monitors and on my cell phone, I've decided that the text size I've been using inside my videos is actually far larger than it needs to be, and probably distracting, so I've decided to reduce it. It's important to consider how eyes process text. Long lines of text reaching across the screen are more burdensome to process than shorter lines unless the characters are large and or the sentences are simplified or abbreviated. You can also get away with longer lines of text if there aren't too many of them. It's also important to consider what kind of textual content you're presenting. You'll find a lot of textbooks and some journals use a two-column format. Studies indicate that this is actually very effective for text consisting of complex sentences, particularly technical or academic text. However, it does depend on the medium. Online media doesn't always function the same way as print media. In the description you'll find links to a couple of studies in this area, including one frequently cited paper by the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State. Their conclusion is, quote, Their study on line lengths also indicated that people tend to read longer lines, around 95 characters per line, faster than shorter lines, around 35 characters per line, though people subjectively feel that shorter lines are faster to read. Most of the time you probably won't need to present a lot of text in your videos. I prefer to cite my sources in my videos and provide sufficient context with which to interpret what I write, so I sometimes end up with three to four lines of text, and on rare occasions may even have up to six. However, I do try to keep the amount of text to a minimum. When considering audio, most people think first about the importance of a quality microphone, some editing software, and possibly some sound baffling. While good recording equipment is important, careful planning of your audio is even more important, and this involves more than simply buying a few products online. Firstly, I strongly recommend writing a complete script of what you intend to say. I always write out a complete script, even though I might not follow it exactly word by word. There are several advantages to this. One is that you're more likely to compose your text coherently when you write than if you simply speak spontaneously. This is important from an accessibility perspective. Reading a well-planned and composed script is more likely to result in a well-organized and coherent narrative, which will be easier to listen to and understand. Another advantage is that once you have a script, you can either use it to correct YouTube's automatically generated subtitles, or you can simply upload the entire script if you want to generate your own subtitles. Either way, it's a very useful tool when creating subtitles, and you should always include subtitles on your videos because it improves accessibility. A third advantage is that once you have recorded your audio, you now have a file you can use for a podcast, and you can upload the script to accompany the podcast for anyone who wants to read while they listen. Writing your script in full is also useful when planning for the next important point I want to raise – making your video accessible to people who will not be viewing it. This includes not only people with visual difficulties who won't be able to watch it directly, but also people who treat YouTube like a podcast, listening to videos rather than viewing them because they're walking or doing something else which makes it impractical to view their phone. Making a video accessible to someone who is only going to listen to it is quite a task. Although it won't stop you including detailed visual information, it does require you to communicate your content in such a way that people don't need to view anything on the screen in order to understand your main points. If you do have visual information in your video which is necessary to communicate your argument, then you should explain it in detail for the benefit of listeners. This requires careful planning in order to coordinate your visuals and your audio, and this is where a well-prepared script is particularly useful. I sometimes include visual information for the benefit of my viewers which I don't describe in my audio, but in such cases it's almost always repeating information I've described previously in some way, or else it's information simply illustrating a point I'm currently making with my audio. What's important is that someone who is only listening to your content can gain the same understanding of your content as someone who is both listening to it and viewing it. I frequently include text in my videos, and when I do so I read any relevant sections out loud for the benefit of anyone who is only listening to the audio. In such cases, I introduce the source, and preface the words from the source by saying QUOTE. After reading the words from my source, I say END QUOTE. These terms help listeners differentiate my source's words from my own. Finally, clear audio is naturally essential for accessibility. However, this requires more than just high-quality recording equipment. It also requires careful diction and pronunciation. Good diction takes practice, as does speed regulation. Some people think it's important to speak slightly slower than average speed to make your speech easier to listen to. I would advise against this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, speaking slower than average speed can be more difficult than speaking faster. It can be harder to establish and maintain your rhythm, and polysyllabic words in particular can sound very awkward when you try to say them slowly. Secondly, YouTube allows people to change the speed at which a video plays, so if people find your speech to be a little too fast, they can easily slow it down themselves. Occasionally, you may need to include words which aren't in your native language. People approach this challenge in several ways. Generally, people speaking in English will anglicise foreign words, pronouncing them with English phonetics. Sometimes they will attempt to say the word the way it sounds in its original language, pronouncing it as best they can and apologising for any errors. Another method people use is to type the word into a speech-to-text engine like Google Translate, record the machine pronunciation, and include this audio in their video instead of trying to say the word themselves. I speak a couple of languages other than English, so I always practice words in their original language in order to pronounce them as accurately as possible. I know my pronunciation won't be perfect, but at least the phonetics will be authentic to the original language, and for me, that's important. You should also consider an audio intro, a short audio clip, preferably unique, you always play at the start of your video. This has several advantages. Firstly, it clearly identifies the video as your own and helps establish a consistent aesthetic for your channel. Secondly, it helps people who are only listening to your videos, as opposed to listening and viewing them. This can also be a helpful audio cue for the hearing impaired. Not only does this audio clip identify the video as your own, it also lets people know when the video will start. My intro sounds like this. It has a distinctive rhythm, and importantly, it's short. Viewers of my videos typically don't have to wait more than 7 seconds before they hear me speaking. It can be a good idea to have an outro as well, for the same reasons. An outro doesn't need to be the same as your intro, and again, should be short and distinctive. Something like this. One more tip is to record your audio at a volume louder than the level at which you expect people to listen to it. If they have to turn the audio up to hear it, they will probably experience distortion, whereas being able to turn the audio down to a comfortable level will avoid this problem. I'm now going to play a clip from a video by a YouTube creator I'm subscribed to, whose audio is excellent, and who I think provides a great example of best practice. If you're interested, their channel is called Night Mind. I've left a link in my video's description.

Speaker 2: Whenever I run into a web series that begins with secret codes and ciphered messages, I immediately try to become more patient than usual in order to evaluate the project. Patience is required when it comes to a series that has code elements in the same way that code breaking itself requires patience.

Speaker 1: Visual Style Creating an attractive and functional aesthetic is important from an accessibility point of view, as well as from a marketing point of view. I colour code the title banners in my videos so viewers can see at a glance which series they belong to just by looking at the thumbnail. I use dark green for my Learning About The Left series, orange for my Responding To Other Creators series, yellow for my 5 Minute Facts series, dark blue for my Deep Dive series, light blue for my Critical Thinking series, light purple for my Humour series, dark red for my Creating Content series, and light red for my Rise and Fall series. This also gives my playlists a consistent look on my channel's homepage and playlist page. Conclusion This concludes my brief advice on making YouTube content accessible. For more information on general and specific accessibility topics, see the links in the video description.