How NHS Digital uses Equal Play for accessible online video
Written by: Richard Kelly
Multimedia Designer | NHS website | NHS Digital
The NHS website for England (www.nhs.uk) is the UK's biggest health website, with more than 50 million visits every month. There were over 7.8 million views of video content on the NHS website in 2020.
A founding principle of the NHS is to provide a comprehensive service, available to all. And that’s precisely the focus for us here in the NHS website multimedia team – to provide video and imagery content that is accessible to all.
In the UK, almost 1 in 5 people have a disability of some kind. Many more have temporary or situational disabilities, like an illness or injury. We are continuously looking at how our users with different user needs interact with our products and services. This is at the heart of our user-centred design approach.
We required our video player on the NHS website to be fully WCAG AA compliant in-line with new accessibility regulations for public sector bodies. With this in mind, we embarked on a discovery project to identify all the available routes and solutions. As part of the discovery, we found Equal Play – a fully AAA accessible standard video player plugin that would integrate with our video hosting platform, Brightcove.
Not only did this solution promise AA standard, which includes providing captions, transcript and audio description (AD) functionality, but it also had a very impressive in-built British Sign language (BSL) toggle that allows users to switch on a sign language interpreter.
Demo player with Audio description, Sign language, captions and transcript.
We were given an Equal Play dashboard to manage our fully accessible video content. This allows an at-a-glance view of what videos have what WCAG accessible rating. For example, if a video only has captions uploaded it will clearly state it is only ‘A’ rating. The regulated pre-requisite is ‘AA’ and once each asset is uploaded to the assigned video it ticks it accordingly. Once we upload the 3 assets per video (caption file, audio description and update the transcript to include audio description cues) we can then publish to live – which updates our video player live on the NHS website.
We put users first when creating and transforming our content. We take an agile, iterative approach, starting with identifying the user needs. We test our products and services with users and use the feedback we receive to learn, iterate and improve.
Equal Play worked with us to make improvements and alterations to our existing player in Brightcove. These improvements came from internal testing, consultation with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and user research. We tested the plugin with people using assistive technology such as screen-readers and fed this back into improving the plugin.
The plugin is now live on the NHS website with any videos that have been uploaded after September 23 2020. It has ensured that all new video content better serves our users and aligns with our ethos of making our content accessible for all.