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Re: FW: transcription of audio

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 5, 2018 12:13PM

Jonathan -

I think the key phrase from Scott's message was "in some instances". A
transcript is the *only* way for a deaf-blind user to get any
multimedia content. I'd certainly argue that no accessibility at all
is more impactful *for this user* than the difficulty imposed on a
blind user accessing a transcript to get the full multimedia content.

According to WCAG's own considerations for how success criterion are
assigned to levels
(https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/conformance#levels), I
just can't see how relegating transcripts to AAA can be justified. A
transcript is "essential", is "possible to satisfy" for all media
content (and has to be generated anyway before captions can be
provided), "could reasonably be achieved", and "has no workarounds"
for deaf-blind and other users. I can't make as strong of arguments on
these points for either audio descriptions or captioning, if a
transcript were provided.

But this shouldn't be a transcript vs. audio description argument -
that's precisely the reason we're in this mess. It should be a
transcript AND audio description argument. Users need both for
accessibility, but WCAG does not currently reflect this. I agree that
moving audio descriptions instead to AAA would not be optimal, but if
I had to choose only one for AA, I would choose transcripts for the
reasons above.

> Text based audio description that is announced by text-to-speech and part of extended audio description is just as easy as captions to create -- you just need a player that supports it.

If it were really this easy we'd actually see audio description in the
wild. There is a special skillset involved in providing good textual
or spoken descriptions of visual-only and audio-only content
(especially in absence of extended audio description) - much more so
than simply transcribing the spoken word. You're absolutely correct
that we need a lot more effort in this area.

Thanks,

Jared