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Re: closed captions with text that's split up in awkward places. Is it compliant?

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Oct 10, 2023 9:31AM

On 10/10/2023 15:17, Jared Smith wrote:
>> WCAG normatively doesn't say anything about the quality of captions
>
> While WCAG doesn't define any useful measure of quality, the normative definition of captions<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-captions> is "synchronized visual and/or text alternative for both speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the media content." The definition also has two notes that state "Captions are equivalents…"
>
> So, one can certainly argue that if the presentation of captions impacts the ability to understand the media content or results in information that is not equivalent that they are not actually captions, and thus not WCAG conformant. How you measure these would be entirely subjective.


WCAG subjective? Never! It's a cut-and-dry set of binary pass/fail
criteria! ;)

Admittedly, there's a lot that could be read into the idea of "needed to
understand" and "equivalent". I'd argue back that these subjective
aspects will be highly inconsistent between auditors, and I'd still
stick with the minimum normatively clear requirements...but we can have
a fight over this next week in Toronto after my talk ;)

--
Patrick H. Lauke

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