JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to widespread lockdowns, many people have had to resort to online resources, such as YouTube, for physical activity (PA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barriers to in-person fitness resources for people with disabilities (PWDs), however, have been reported long before the COVID-19 pandemic. To investigate whether fitness content creators on YouTube have made their videos more accessible to PWDs would not only be informative about equitable access to PA during COVID-19, but could also provide insight into the feasibility of disabled individuals relying on YouTube for fitness content in a post-COVID-19 world who have not felt comfortable in more traditional fitness settings, such as gyms.

Objective:

To ascertain whether a change in the availability of accessible fitness resources for PWDs occurred on YouTube between before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondary aims are to investigate if different categories of YouTube channels produce more accessible fitness content and highlight any disparities in disability-friendly physical activity content on YouTube.

Methods:

A cross-sectional text analysis of exercise-related YouTube videos was conducted. The authors used Python (version 3.0) to access the YouTube database via its Data Application Programming Interface (API) and search videos with terms of interest. Terms pertaining to physical activity that were searched on YouTube to find exercise-related videos include: ‘at home exercise,’ ‘exercise at home,’ ‘exercise no equipment,’ ‘home exercise,’ ‘home-based exercise,’ ‘no equipment workout,’ and ‘workout no equipment.’ Various elements (e.g., view count, content generation) of the videos published between 01/01/2019 and 06/30/2019 (n=700), were compared to the elements of videos published between 01/01/2020 and 06/30/2020 (n=700). To ascertain a broad idea of disability-friendly videos on YouTube, videos were labeled “accessible” if they were found in the first 100 video results and if their title, description(s) or tags contained the following terms: ‘Para,’ ‘Paralympic,’ ‘Adaptive,’ ‘Adapted,’ ‘Disabled,’ ‘Disability,’ ‘Differently-abled,’ ‘Disability-friendly,’ ‘Wheelchair accessible,’ and ‘Inclusive.’

Results:

Removing video duplicates that reappeared in term searches resulted in 1038 unique videos (508 in 2019 and 530 in 2020). The analysis revealed that accessible terms applicable to PWDs had minimal appearances in 2019 (21 videos) and 2020 (19 videos). None of the first ten fitness videos that populated on YouTube from 2019 or 2020 were accessible.

Conclusions:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a slight decrease in the number of accessible PA videos on YouTube. This suggests that the proportion of accessible disability-friendly videos remains diminutive relative to the prevalence of disability in the general population, revealing that disability-friendly videos are seldom findable on YouTube. Thus, the need for disability-friendly fitness content to be easily searched and found remains urgent if access to digital fitness resources is to improve.