WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Audio description and captions

for

From: Mallory
Date: Feb 9, 2024 10:21PM

Hm. People who use captions expect captions to be captions and do captioning--and remember that sometimes there's a lot of spoken text, sounds and music that need to be in those captions. Sometimes it's hard to read fast enough (and I'm a regular caption user and feel I'm used to it and do pretty well). AD is, sorry, a superbuttload of text. Even if your video is "simple" enough that you can keep to sticking to 2 lines (3 max!) of text at a time and even if the text is rolling, do you then need to go twice as fast in replacing that text because it's the AD (which by necessity is wordy as hell)? We already can't do much for caption users who are slow/poor readers. Having the captions BE the AD makes that problem worse. Or you can make twice the work and have two captions: real captions and AD captions. I don't like that idea but I'm sure there's content out there that would benefit from it. There's always something weird in the world.

I agree and like the mention earlier of transcripts including what's mentioned in the AD, although that does deviate from the "traditional" use of transcripts and may make it closer to a screenplay, but fully agree with the idea that a transcript including the AD text allows the video's full information be accessible via transcript.

On Fri, Feb 9, 2024, at 10:01 PM, Andrews, David B (DEED) via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> I think the answer is no. The intended audience for each service is
> intended for a different audience and there isn't much cross-over.
> Think about how best to serve your audience -- not just how to conform
> to the standard.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>