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Re: Audio description for video when there are insufficient gaps

for

From: glen walker
Date: Jun 9, 2019 11:25PM

To expand on what Lucy said, if you look at the "understanding" doc for
1.2.5 and scroll to the bottom for the definitions ("key terms"), the
second note for "audio description" talks about an "extended audio
description", which is further defined at
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#dfn-extended-audio-description and says,
"audio description that is added to an audiovisual presentation by pausing
the video so that there is time to add additional description". So there
is a concept of pausing the video to allow for an audio description. Not a
pleasant solution, but is possible.

If you go back to the "audio description" definition, it says, "narration
added to the soundtrack to describe *important visual details *that cannot
be understood from the main soundtrack alone". If you don't have
sufficient time for the description and the description is not "important",
then you *might *be ok. Obviously you want to describe as much as you can
but the definition sort of implies that if there are non-important details
and you don't have a sufficient pause then you could maybe leave out those
details. But that doesn't help if the details *are *important and you
don't have a pause. Then it's back to "extended audio description".

However, if you look at 1.2.7 which is a AAA requirement, it specifically
tries to address your situation.


*"Where pauses in foreground audio are insufficient to allow audio
descriptions to convey the sense of the video, extended audio description
is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media."*

Since we have a AAA success criteria to address your situation, that kind
of implies that if you don't have sufficient pauses, you do the best you
can with the current video and that's good enough for 1.2.5. Or at least
that's how I'm interpreting it. Otherwise we wouldn't need 1.2.7.

Glen