WCAG 2.1 Article 1.2.1

Hey everybody! Josh here with Online ADA. 

In this video we’re gonna cover article 1.2.1 of the WCAG accessibility guidelines. WCAG 2.1, article 1.2.1 reads, “audio only and video only pre-recorded”. This is going to be for circumstances where on your website you have an audio tag or a video tag that is only displaying one or the other. If you had those things playing together in one video that’s considered synchronized media, but this is talking about audio only or video only. 

It’s an important distinction in this case When you have audio only or video only we’re gonna read, “for pre-recorded audio only and pre-recorded video only media the following our true, except when the audio or video is a media alternative for text and it’s clearly labeled as such”. So that’s basically saying that if you have a video only element that plays and you provided an audio track for it, if you label it as being the media alternative for that video then it doesn’t need to have it own media alternative and continue on down that chain. 

For pre-recorded audio only an alternative for time based media is provided the presents equivalent information for pre-recorded audio content. For pre-recorded video only content, either an alternative for time based media or an audio track is provided that presents equivalent information for pre-recorded video only content. 

For video only elements a common way of getting an alternative for that, is gonna be to have an audio version of what the video has or some sort of audio description. 

Videos are a lot easier in my opinion because you can add many different things to make them compliant. One of those is captions, which actually falls into another guideline, but it can also be helpful here as you can have the information that is being presented in the video, is being described on the screen in a caption. That would be one way to meet this particular article. 

Another way would be to simply present an audio version of the video, so if have a animation or gif or some sort of like really short video that’s just like a a demonstration of how something is working. Like let’s say how to tie a tie. You have a video that just shows somebody the steps to tie a tie and it’s just like a, a one minute video of someone doing that. An audio description would read the steps that they take to do that, sort of like if you were reading a Wikipedia article page of the same thing. You have the description in text or an audio of what’s happening in the video. It isn’t often that I run into these particular scenarios. All media that I run into when I’m doing my audits is synchronized media and that is actually a whole separate situation. 

So the best way to provide alternatives for audio only content is by providing a text alternative. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, or at least I’ve never run into a situation where it made sense to provide a video alternative for the audio content. 

And that wraps up this guideline. Thanks for joining me. I’ll see you on the next video.