WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: SC 1.2.2 and YouTube's auto captions

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jun 27, 2017 2:59PM


John Foliot wrote:

> Sadly, there is nothing in that language that specifies *accuracy*, only
> that captions must exist.

While there's not a defined accuracy level (e.g., 95%), the WCAG
normative definition for "captions" -
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#captionsdef - does prescribe that the
captions provide "information needed to understand the media content"
and that "captions convey not only the content of spoken dialogue, but
also equivalents for non-dialogue audio information".

By my interpretation, if the captions don't allow the user to
understand the media content or don't convey the content of the spoken
dialogue and non-dialogue audio, then they would not be conformant.
Measuring this definitively is a bit difficult, though it's clear that
many (most?) YouTube auto-captions would not align with this
definition.

Jared