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I think I understand what web accessibility means, but I'm not sure how we can make media files accessible. Can you share some more insights, please?
WAI-Aria has a pretty detailed walkthrough of what is needed for Making Audio and Video Media Accessible. The gist is that for each type of media, you should have a backup for those that can not use that media.
For instance, those with hearing impairments can't hear a podcast or listen to a video. Transcripts and subtitles help bridge that gap. For images, and videos (or parts of videos) with no dialogue, alt tags, titles, and descriptions of the visuals and their context to your content, are all ways to keep the media inclusive. Screen readers play the role of reading the descriptions out loud to those that either can not read, or can not see, but only if the content is available to the screen readers to read.
The idea of web accessibility is to make web content available to as many people as possible irrespective of their disability status. If the content is a photograph. It's accessible to people who can see, but those who can't see still needs the information conveyed by the image. That's why we use alt text. What of video content? We have 2 points of exclusion here – vision and audio. We can use closed-captioning to complement the audio. We can also have a transcript available.
It's important to note that disability is a spectrum and people fit in different parts of that spectrum.
Media accessibility has is concerned with the more visual aspect of accessibility. It focuses on what people see, understand, and uses. So using the right colors for example, so that people with visual impairments(color blindness, achromatopia, etc. ) Can navigate your platform while understanding what's going on. Essentially how the human eyes can play a role in disabilities and how we can make a better web experience. I have done a talk about this drive.google.com/open . Please check it out. It offers some insight on how you can understand and implement Media Accessibility
By media files, I am guessing you mean images, videos, audio. (Will edit my answer if you mean something else).
Image
<text> for any embedded textalt="")Video
Audio accessibility is similar, but removes the dimension of captioning and audio description.
Lastly I would say that accessibility also includes data and bandwidth restrictions. Our tendency in tech is to centre powerful high-end computers and phones, but most of the world is operating on much different equipment and many folks pay by data.
Hopefully that gives you a start to do more research! 🤓