3 Ways To Increase Your Sales Videos’ Accessibility
As sales teams increasingly use video messaging, discover why video accessibility is crucial and three ways to improve it.
Sales teams are increasingly using video messaging to reach more prospective customers. However, these videos need to be created with accessibility in mind. Margaret Henney, director of marketing at Covideo, discusses three ways to improve the accessibility of sales videos.
As sales teams incorporate video messaging into their customer touchpoints to drive sales conversions, they are reaching more prospective customers than ever. By putting people in front of prospects, video stands out from more generic email and text messages and fosters engagement. An authentic, personalized video hosted by a member of your sales team is a powerful way to drive interest in your products and get one step closer to closing a deal.
Video has enormous potential to create these vital connections. But if you are not creating your video messages with accessibility in mind, you will not be able to connect with everyone you are hoping to reach.
According to WHO, over a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. In the U.S. alone, about 48 million people live with some level of hearing loss that makes communication difficult, and 21 million people report visual impairments. The chances of anyone experiencing some disability, whether permanent or temporary, during their lifetime is high. Prioritizing video accessibility does not just improve the experience of a handful of potential customers; it promises everyone a better experience.
Websites and email marketing campaigns are slowly evolving to prioritize accessibility by embracing text, formatting and coding choices to make content easier for all readers to understand. Sales and marketing professionals are making paragraphs clearer and more concise and refining their code to ensure its compatibility with assistive technologies. They are improving text contrast and size and adding alternative descriptions to photos.
Sales teams committed to reaching all their potential customers while maximizing the value of their personalized sales videos must make all their sales content, especially their sales videos, more accessible to everyone.
See More: 4 Steps To Maximize Won/Lost Program ROI
Accessibility Extends the Reach of Your Videos
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains an extensive guide to accessibility standards and recommendations, the Web Accessibility Content Guidelines, for online text, images, audio and video. While making media accessible is vital for people with disabilities, accessibility improves experiences for everyone, including people with changing abilities, situational limitations (such as a loud workspace) or an inconsistent internet connection.
W3C has found that increasing video accessibility generates better business outcomes:
- Driving innovation by adding an accessibility perspective to your work.
- Enhancing your brand through a clear commitment to accessibility as part of inclusion efforts.
- Extending your market reach to include people with disabilities.
- Minimizing legal risks associated with failing to meet digital accessibility standards, depending on the industry.
Strategies to Improve Video Accessibility
Here is a look at three ways to improve the accessibility of your sales videos.
1. Provide Captions
Captioning your videos enables people with hearing disabilities to understand your content, helping you make connections from afar. But captions are not only helpful to people with hearing impairment: many viewers use and appreciate video captions. People with learning disabilities or neurodivergence that affects speech comprehension benefit from captions, as do people who use assistive technology like screen readers to process text into audio or Braille.
Other people may have a situational need for captions. For example, you might have used captions when streaming video because you were in a noisy room, or the video you watched included poorly recorded audio. Perhaps you misplaced your headphones and did not want to turn on your sound in a shared workspace. These are all reasons people use captions when viewing video messages.
The WCAG requires captions for any prerecorded multimedia content. Including video captioning is one way that businesses open to the public and can improve their compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Captions should consist of speech and non-speech audio information synchronized with the video as it plays.
Open and closed captions: When you implement captioning into your video messages, you will need to decide whether to use open or closed captions. Whereas closed captions play on a separate track from your video and can be turned on and off, open captions exist on the video track and play automatically with the video. Open captions are incompatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies, so opt for closed captions whenever possible.
Automatic captioning: Some video messaging technology provides automatically generated captions. These captions offer a helpful starting point but do not meet accessibility requirements because they often include errors that convolute or change your message. A missing word, such as “not,” changes the meaning of a statement, as do words misheard by speech recognition technology. These errors diminish the experience for users reliant on video captioning. Have your team review and edit automatic captions so that all the text accurately reflects speech and non-speech audio.
2. Include Transcripts
While accessibility standards do not require transcripts, including one can maximize the value of your video content. Providing a transcript allows users to read at their own pace rather than the pace of your video message. In addition, well-written transcripts contribute to SEO efforts. Search engines cannot listen to audio or watch videos but can index text you include on the page, making your video content more “crawlable.”
Use captions to help build your transcript and vice versa.
See More: Top 10 Speech Recognition Software and Platforms
3. Choose an Accessible Video Player
Providing an accessible video experience extends beyond making a single video with captions and a transcript. Your video player can introduce hurdles for users, especially those who use a keyboard with no mouse. Employ an accessible video player to help all users navigate your video messages more successfully. Accessible video players work:
- Without a mouse.
- With a speech interface.
- When a page is zoomed larger.
- With screen reader technology.
An accessible video player should provide keyboard support and clear player control labels and use sufficient color contrast. Some players offer options for users to change the video playback speed, customize caption display settings and read captions with a screen reader or braille device.
Accessibility Is a Journey
Technology constantly changes, so the work of accessibility is never complete. As your sales teams incorporate video messaging into additional prospect touchpoints, you will have significant opportunities to identify and satisfy accessibility needs. By prioritizing accessibility instead of treating it as an afterthought, you will reach your audience on their terms without sacrificing your message.
What steps have you taken to improve the accessibility of your sales videos? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Image Source: Shutterstock
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