One of my favorite things on the internet is described videos and pictures of animals on social media, especially when people are sharing their own pets or favorite animals. While I can see many details of a video or image when I zoom in, I often miss out on other details or may not understand how a caption or other information connects back to whatever content I’m viewing, which is where video descriptions can be useful. Here are my tips for how to write video descriptions for animal video on social media for visually impaired audiences, inclusive of blind, low vision, and neurological visual impairment.
Reasons to describe animal videos on social media
There are many benefits to adding video descriptions for animal videos for audiences on social media, including those with visual impairments like me. Some of these benefits include:
- Many videos of animals that are filmed in less-than-ideal lighting conditions so it can be more difficult to locate them
- Other animals may blend into the background or be difficult to track, so knowing how they move is helpful. Alternatively, visual clutter may make it challenging to locate where they are.
- While captions often provide some information on a video, they do not explicitly describe what is happening in the video in most cases.
- 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, especially if a pop song is playing or other unrelated audio.
- 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, or tell the difference between similar looking species.
- Even though I have trouble seeing animals clearly with low vision, I am a huge animal lover and use video descriptions as a way of providing additional context for an image or video.
As a viewer with low vision, I often use video descriptions to provide additional context for something I’m watching and to essentially “confirm” what I am looking at. For example, I once thought I was watching a video of adorable baby polar bears, and they were actually samoyed puppies- the video description provided this clarification.
Related links
- Ten “Odd” Things I Do With Double Vision
- Learning To Explain Usable Vision
- All About Visual Assistance Apps For Visually Impaired
What is video description?
A video description is a text-based description of what is happening in a video. Video descriptions provide information about the audio (typically in the form of transcripts) and visual content, which can help viewers better understand what is going on. Video descriptions closely resemble alt text and image descriptions, which are used for making images accessible online and on social media platforms. Video descriptions are more similar to image descriptions than alt text because they are “exposed” in comments or captions so anyone can read them, compared to alt text that is typically hidden and only recognized by screen readers.
Related links
- How To Write Alt Text For Gifs
- How To Add Alt Text On Social Media
- How To Write Video Descriptions For TikTok
- How To Write Alt Text and Image Descriptions for the Visually Impaired
Is there a difference between audio description and video description?
Another video accessibility option is audio description (also known as descriptive audio) which is an additional narrative track that plays alongside a video, providing information about visual elements such as scene changes, facial expressions, and movement that wouldn’t otherwise be noticeable to a viewer with vision loss. Unlike video descriptions, audio descriptions do not describe the audio of a video, and only provide information about visual elements. In addition, video descriptions are posted in the caption or comments of a video, and have no impact on the video viewing experience. A video description is also different from captions or YouTube transcripts, which focus exclusively on audio content in a video with no additional visual descriptions.
Related links
- Fast Facts About Audio Description
- All About Audio Description For Broadway Plays
- How To Create Audio Description For YouTube With YouDescribe
- Creating Audio Description For Viral Videos With YouDescribe
- How To Use Audio Description Devices at Disney World and Disneyland
How to describe animal videos
When it comes to learning how to write video descriptions for animal videos, I find it helpful to use an informal “checklist” of helpful information to describe, which focus on elements of the video that are essential to enjoying it and that would be likely to come up when talking about the video in conversation. While not all of these details may apply to an individual video or be shared in this exact order, here are examples of elements to include:
Location of the video
If the video is filmed at a specific zoo, aquarium, wildlife sanctuary, or similar destination, share the name of the location before getting into additional details. If this information is already included in the account name (e.g. official social media), mentioned in the caption, or otherwise shared in the video, this can be skipped. However, if the video is being shot in an unexpected location such as outside of an animal’s exhibit or where an animal would not otherwise be expected, this should be shared.
If the time period in which the video took place is relevant, such as historical/archival footage, specific seasons, or during a time of remodeling/closures, including the day, month, and/or year would be useful for providing context for why a video may be different.
Who is in the video
Some zoos and wildlife centers have specific names for their animals, while others may just share the name of the species. For example, Fiona the Hippo is a well-known hippopotamus from the Cincinnati Zoo, while other zoos may use numbers or codes to label animals instead of names. If the animal name is unknown, just give the species name.
If there are multiple animals in a group, share their names (if available) or the number of animals that are in the group, such as five otters. If there is an overwhelmingly large number that is hard to count individually like a large school of fish or group of butterflies, an estimate of dozens, hundreds, or thousands is okay.
Short description of what the animal looks like
In this context, it is reasonable to assume that someone has a mental model for what a hippo or other well-known animals look like. However, if the animal has particularly interesting features, or if there are two similar animals in the video, share details such as the color, size, patterns, or other details that make this animal “stand out” from the others. If the purpose of the video is to describe the animal’s appearance, this section can go on a bit longer to help with providing more detailed descriptions such as size, weight, color, texture, and similar.
Facial expressions and body language
In many viral videos, animals use nonverbal body language and facial expressions to communicate, such as smiles, yawns, stretching, and similar. Since these human-like movements are often what makes these videos so popular, share descriptions of how the animal moves and where it is looking- this can be at the camera, at another animal/subject on screen, at their own reflection, or similar.
On-camera movement
The purpose of some animal videos is to capture actions like eating, running, playing, jumping, and swimming, especially if they have a caption related to these topics. Including these activities in video descriptions for animal videos can help to fill in gaps (“why is this video captioned mood?”) as well as educate audiences about animal enrichment activities.
In some videos, it may also be appropriate to include information about inaction, such as if an animal is asleep while others run around it or if they are just standing on the edge of their exhibit. The original video caption can be a good way to figure out where the focal point of the video should be.
Interactions with surroundings
Many animals captured on video are social creatures, and interact with animals, humans, and other items within their environment. This can include an animal noticing the camera and running closer, getting excited over a toy or watching fish swim, or playing with a companion.
Significant background noise
Even though most descriptive content for visually impaired audiences does not include descriptions of sounds, video descriptions often do. If a bird gives a loud squawk at another bird or a dog barks at a fence, these are helpful details to include since it may not be obvious to the viewer what the sound is being directed at or where it is coming from. Background music that doesn’t have any significance on the video can be ignored.
What not to describe
Unless it is relevant to the video, information to exclude when writing video descriptions for animal videos on social media include:
- Over-describing what the species or animal looks like- many visually impaired people have a mental model for what a giraffe looks like, so there is no need to describe that it has a long neck and spots. If the point of the video is to show off what the animal looks like and there is no audio/existing caption that shows what the animal looks like, including this information is ok.
- Over-describing color- again, many visually impaired people have a mental model for what color looks like if they do not have color vision or are otherwise colorblind, so there’s no need to describe what green looks like
- Irrelevant items in the background, such as a stop sign or other items that are not important to the video
- Timestamps for how long an animal does something- I don’t need to know that a lion ran for exactly seven seconds unless there is an onscreen timer animation, but it is helpful to know that it ran across its enclosure to a watering hole.
- Random comments about the animal or information that is not relevant to the video
Example video descriptions for animal videos
Some examples of video descriptions for animal videos I have seen on Twitter include:
- An African penguin walking outside its enclosure approaches a beluga whale tank and watches the beluga swim in front of them. The beluga smiles and makes excited facial expressions
- A museum volunteer shows off an amelanistic striped corn snake with vertical dark orange and light orange stripes and a yellow body that is about one meter long. The snake looks at the camera with its red eyes and sticks out its tongue several times
- Piper the yellow lab notices her owner typing on the computer and puts her head in her owner’s lap and looks up at the camera
- A male blue betta fish inside a small desktop aquarium swims up to the camera and turns to his side, showing off his red fins
- A giant panda at the National Zoo holds bamboo in their paws and chews on the end while looking at the camera
Users do not need to write overly detailed or long descriptions on social media, as these videos are often fairly short. I try to keep character limits in mind when writing my own descriptions, and typically try to keep it to 250-500 characters depending on the length of the video.
Where to add video descriptions on social media
For users that are posting their own videos, I recommend including video descriptions at the bottom of the post caption and writing “Video Description:” followed by the description. Another option is to pin a video description comment to the top of a thread, and mention that there is a video description included in the comments before publishing the original caption.
On platforms like X and Tumblr where posts can be quoted/have visible comments before being shared on a user’s feed, writing the video description as a quote tweet or visible reply to the original post can make it easier to locate the video description.
If a video did not include a video description when it was first posted, the caption can be edited by the original author or another user can repost the video with description added and tag the original creator/post.
Related links
- How To Add Alt Text On Social Media
- How To Write Alt Text For Memes
- Avoiding Flashing Lights On Social Media
More tips for writing video descriptions for animal videos
- Interested in supplementing tactile models of animals alongside animal videos? Check out Free Braille Art and Tactile Image Libraries: World Braille Day 2024
- Another technique I’ve used to teach people how to write alt text and image descriptions is to imagine they are describing the video while on the phone with a friend who isn’t looking at it. What are the details the friend needs to know in order to understand the purpose of the video?
- Want more alt text content? Browse Alt Text Archives | Veronica With Four Eyes (www.veroniiiica.com)
Published April 4, 2020. Updated November 2024