The majority of Shorthand stories contain video or audio. A review of mid 2017 Shorthand stories reveals that nearly two-thirds contain video of some kind, while around 9% contain audio in the form of Soundcloud or mp3 assets.

Video and audio content primarily present accessibility challenges for people with auditory, visual and cognitive impairments. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines describe a range of appropriate alternatives and additions to time-based media, including textual transcripts, captions, audio description and sign language interpretation. Though transcription and captioning services have traditionally been very expensive, the barriers to entry are being lowered through improvements in speech recognition technologies. For example, Google now provides automatic captioning of YouTube videos in ten languages.

According to our review of Shorthand stories, many storytellers utilise open or closed captioning on a subset of their videos; in contrast, very few provide transcripts or audio description, and none provide sign language interpretation. Captioning is appropriate for around half of all Shorthand stories: this includes stories with videos containing speech, and most stories with audio-only assets. The actual captioning rate for mid 2017 stories sits at around 27%. Though this statistic is encouraging - and increasing - the quality of captioning is variable. The majority of captions found in Shorthand stories are YouTube auto-captions containing uncorrected speech recognition errors. The accessibility of captioned media is only as good as the quality of the captions. If you choose to employ YouTube captions, be sure to carefully review the captions all the way through to the end of your video, and then follow Google's instructions for editing captions that contain transcription errors.

Media in Shorthand stories. Statistics obtained via review of 100 stories published in mid 2017.

When using native HTML video, as well as custom media players such as JW Player, Brightcove and Able Player, you can provide captions by supplying one or more WebVTT files - timed track files containing marked-up text to be displayed alongside the media. WebVTT not only enables captioning for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, but also addition of subtitles for foreign language speakers. The WebVTT syntax is simple to use, and is described comprehensively in the W3C WebVTT working draft.

You can handcraft a WebVTT file or use software to assist with the correct markup. The University of Washington provides a list of great free resources that can be used to caption video, while WebAIM provides tips on captions, transcripts and audio descriptions. At present, the Shorthand editor doesn't provide built-in support for attaching WebVTT files to videos in media sections; however, the custom HTML code to add a video element with a WebVTT track is straightforward. The blog of web developer Ian Devlin covers a variety of WebVTT captioning examples, ranging from the conventional to the creative, including captioning of audio (mp3) with the HTML5 video tag.

As a final note on media accessibility, we would like to make brief mention of media that plays automatically. By design, Shorthand stories will not autoplay audio, unless you add custom code to switch on this feature. Audio that begins automatically is not only unpopular with readers - it also presents accessibility challenges, especially for users of screen readers, as it competes with other voice output and can be challenging for the user to switch off. If you do elect to include audio that plays automatically, consider the WCAG success criterion on audio control in terms of the length of your sound clip and the affordances of your audio player.