Hi Viewer,

Over the last few weeks, I have seen a large number of animal videos on my social media feeds, and questions about how to write video descriptions for animal videos on social media. From penguins wandering around an aquarium to people’s dogs smiling at the camera, I love that more and more accounts are sharing adorable animal content, even though many of these videos are difficult for me to see with low vision. Here are my tips for how to write video descriptions for animal videos on social media for blind and visually impaired audiences.

REASONS TO DESCRIBE ANIMAL VIDEOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

There are many benefits to adding video descriptions for animal videos for audiences who are blind or that have low vision, as well as people who have normal sight. Some of these benefits include:

Many videos of animals that are being posted right now are in less-than-ideal lighting conditions so it can be more difficult to see them in a video

Other animals may blend into the background or be difficult to track, so knowing how they move is helpful

While captions often provide some information on a video, they do not explicitly describe what is happening

Some videos do not have any animal audio or it is difficult to figure out what is going on in a video based on audio alone

For people who have a phobia of certain animals and have the species name listed as a muted word, having the species name listed in a video description can help someone avoid seeing a video of an animal that they do not want to see, especially if this isn’t mentioned in the original post

Animals can be difficult to identify, so having the species name listed or other descriptive information can help a user better imagine what the animal looks like

People and organizations are posting a ton of animal videos right now, and people with visual impairments want to see your cute animal videos too!

WHAT IS VIDEO DESCRIPTION?

In this context, video description is a text-based description of a short video that is posted on a social media platform such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, TikTok, or a similar platform. I think of video descriptions of being the equivalent of alt text for videos, as they describe visual information for audiences that might not be able to see it otherwise. However, unlike alt text, video descriptions can be read by anyone, even if they aren’t using assistive technology.