WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Captions and transcripts

for

From: Terzian, Sharon
Date: Jan 10, 2012 6:33AM

The thing is, you COULD make the printed transcript in a very large font (we just went through this discussion over a video presented at TASH)


Sharon Terzian
Webmistress
Paul V. Sherlock Center on Disabilities
Rhode Island College
http://www.sherlockcenter.org
Adjunct Professor, CIS
College of Management



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 12:12 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Captions and transcripts

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Kevin White < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Captions are not needed when the synchronized media is, itself, an alternate presentation of information that is also presented via text on the Web page.

Note that this same allowance is provided for transcripts (what WCAG call "alternative for time-based media") and audio descriptions.

I'm the one that recommended this addition to WCAG 2.0. The point was that if the main content of the page is identical to the video content, and both are presented together (particularly when the video is provided to enhance accessibility of that main content to some users), requiring captions, a transcript, and/or audio descriptions would simply be yet another unnecessary duplication of this content that is already fully accessible. In other words, if the video is an equivalent alternative to the main content, then these additional alternatives are not required.

It would be hard to argue that a video is an equivalent alternative to its own transcript. Instead, the transcript is the alternative to the video. In other words, you wouldn't have provided the transcript if you didn't have a video there. In this case, the captions AND the transcript (or, if you prefer, audio descriptions for Level A and AA
conformance) are required.

Hopefully that makes a bit of sense.

Jared