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EN 301 549 Video requirements discussion

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Sep 13, 2021 8:46AM

Hi all,

EN 301 549 criterion 7.1.5 indicates that subtitles and captions need to be spoken. This requirement is aimed at making sure that foreign language subtitles are available to people who are blind or visually impaired. The requirement seems to use the word "sub titles" in the heading but in the actual criterion seems to state "captions" and also uses the word "captions" in Appendix C for test steps. This would seem to indicate that spoken captions could be interpreted as needed for all web content that has captions or subtitles under EN 301549 V3.1.1 (and that are programmatically available ).

Is there any different interpretations of this requirement for web sites? Even if the requirement is for sub-titles only it would seem that you'd have to implement some approach where the sub-titles could be announced either through a button to speak them in an audio track or by using a live region to have the screen reader announce them. The latter being difficult in some situations due to timing.

Also criterion 7.1.4 indicates that captions need to be adjustable to user settings - the criterion lists some items that can be used to contribute to meeting the criterion - but doesn't clearly state what is or is not actually required to meet it. While all of the items listed are useful including being able to change the font outline, color, size, background, and opacity - it fails to state explicitly if all of those are actually required. So it would seem that all web video players would need to support some level of customization to meet this criterion but there may be inconsistency in how it is interpreted.

Jonathan