1.2.6 – Sign Language (Pre-recorded)
Provide sign language translations for pre-recorded videos.
Users with hearing impairments can benefit from seeing a sign language translation of your video soundtracks. In fact, those whose first language is a sign language may have limited reading ability, meaning captions can be difficult to follow.
Sign language is also faster to interpret than written captions and can convey emotion and tone much better.
How to pass
Make an alternative version of your video with a sign language interpreter either present in the main video or embedded as picture-in-picture and link to it from near the original content.
Tips
An obvious issue is the question of which sign language to use. Forms of sign language are often exclusive to a particular country; even British and American sign languages are completely distinct, despite the similarities of the written language.
The best bet is to provide sign language in the language of the country that you are targeting, or if you are multi-national, in the language of the country of the highest proportion of your visitors.
You’ll need to find and hire a sign language interpreter for your videos.
Now you’ve read up on 1.2.6 – Sign Language (Pre-recorded), join the discussion at wuhcag.com. Myself and the Wuhcag community are always on hand to help with questions and we’d love to learn your tips and tricks for this guideline.
While you’re here, I wanted to share with you an interesting new web accessibility project that’s been shown to me in its very early stages. Robert Mion is building a fun new way to teach kids (and big kids) web accessibility by using cats (thankfully not the movie).
Check out The A11y Cats at rmion.com/cats.