Video consumption on the web has increased markedly in recent years. Universities use videos in different teaching-learning modalities, as well as on their websites, to publish information aimed at their stakeholders. Access to education and information has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions and the constitutions of most countries. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that videos published on the web can be accessed by people with disabilities. The universality of the web is so important that some organizations worldwide have contributed to the development of standards and recommendations focused on web accessibility. Despite these efforts, the rights of millions of people are currently violated, as they are excluded from access to both education and information published on the web. Regarding videos, the reasons are a lack of captions, sign language, audio descriptions, and transcriptions, among others. The objective of this study is to evaluate the accessibility of videos published on YouTube by the best universities in the world based on compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of the World Wide Web Consortium. We carry out a manual evaluation of 91,421 videos, which were all published on YouTube by 113 universities taken from the Shanghai Ranking. Our purpose is to highlight the urgent need to change the current low level of accessibility that their educational videos show. Consequently, statistical results are presented regarding the compliance with video accessibility according to the regions and positions of the universities in the ranking.

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Multimedia has become one of the most important sources of information and communication on the web. However, despite recent technological progress, people with disabilities and the elderly face difficulties accessing multimedia on the web. In some cases, these difficulties are impossible to overcome and are a fundamental cause of digital exclusion. Given the importance of this topic, several investigations on the problems of accessing multimedia resources have been carried out. Some organizations have also proposed certain standards to guide the creation and publication of accessible web content. Nevertheless, the authoring tools used in the process of publishing multimedia on the web do not offer all the accessibility features required. Authoring tools can also be used by people who do not have knowledge about web accessibility or programming, resulting in web publications lacking accessibility. This research proposes 278 novel techniques to guide authors, designers, programmers, and testers in the publication of accessible and inclusive multimedia on the web. These techniques are designed to guarantee the compliance with the recommended success criteria of Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 of the World Wide Web Consortium. Moreover, these techniques can be used to evaluate the accessibility of the existing authoring tools used to create multimedia for the web. Additionally, we present 80 possible failures that can cause the non-fulfillment of ATAG 2.0. These failures can help authors discern what to avoid and help evaluators check whether particular multimedia is accessible. INDEX TERMS Accessibility, accessibility content, Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0, disabilities, e-learning, multimedia, techniques, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).