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Re: Alternative presentation of content

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Jan 4, 2018 12:47PM

Thank you, Sandy and Jonathan, for your responses.

What I wrote wasn't clear enough; probably the issues were not clear enough in my own mind either!

Our client wants the text on screen to "fill in" as the audio clip plays. The on screen text will be different from what is in the audio track. Personally, I think this raises an instructional design issue of comprehension for all users, and especially those with cognitive disabilities. The client, however, seems convinced this design will hold a user's attention better than static text and an audio that plays only when clicked, which was what we proposed.

But apart from that, is there a 508 requirement to synchronize screen-reader access to the on-screen text with the audio track as it plays? How would a vision-impaired user switch from audio to screen reader recitation of on-screen text and back again to audio as new text is displayed? Nothing in the audio alerts the user to there being new text on screen. I am not sure that any aria-live magic would help here, either. So it seems we would want the vision-impaired user to listen to the audio in its entirety and then have the screen reader recite all the text that has accumulated on the screen. Is this non-synchronized experience acceptable in terms of accessibility requirements as equivalent to that of sighted users.

Hearing-impaired users would also have a non-synchronized experience since they would read the audio transcript and the on-screen text in whatever order they want with no sense that the one is synchronized with the other.

Is this OK?

If it is not we considered writing NEW text that would fold all the "pieces" of on-screen text into the relevant "pieces" of audio transcript text so that listening to this new text in a screen reader (vision-impaired users) or just reading it (hearing-impaired) would actually be equivalent to the synchronized experience of the content that hearing and vision unimpaired users have.

Is that necessary?

A related question was whether having an audio clip play automatically when the page loads, with no user click on a Play button required, is acceptable. We assumed it is not, but perhaps that is incorrect. Perhaps the navigation button that loads each page could have an aria-label like "Move to next screen and play audio" or something like that.

Alan

On 1/3/18, 10:49 PM, "Jonathan Avila" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

Alan,

It seems like there may be some confusion about the captions/transcript you are talking about. I may misunderstand your question -- but based on what I think you are saying If you have audio and text on the screen that the screen reader can access then there is no requirement to make the audio into text for a screen reader user under the current standards.

The group of users that is likely to have the issue is users who are deaf or hard of hearing including people who are deafblind who may not have access to what is spoken in the audio that is different than what is on-screen. For this group of users they will want synchronized text (if the visual and audio are synchronized) or transcript (if synchronization is not used)

If the content is slide based with next buttons without any real synchronization -- text is on-screen and there is audio then you likely can make a case to display a pop-up with the audio as text presented in a box that doesn't cover the visual content.

Again, I can't say for sure without looking at your situation -- so these are just some initial thoughts based on what you describe.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
Level Access, inc. (formerly SSB BART Group, inc.)
(703) 637-8957
<EMAIL REMOVED>
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