Hey everybody. Josh here with Online ADA.
In this video we’re gonna cover article 1.2.2. Captions. This is for pre-recorded content. Let’s dive in.
This is a level A accessibility guideline and it reads, ‘Captions are provided for all pre recorded audio content in synchronized media, except when the media is a media alternative for text and it’s clearly labeled as such. Synchronized media is the key word in this one.
In our previous WCAG article we talked about audio only and video only. That’s the opposite of synchronized media. This is where both of those things are combined together in one element. You will see this often times when people have YouTube videos or Vimeo videos embedded on their website. It’s important to understand that when you use these videos and embed them on your site you have to provide captions for them.
It’s also important to understand the distinction between subtitles and captions. Subtitles provide text alternatives for the dialogue only. When two actors are talking to each other in a scene, in a video, the subtitle would read their words to each other but it wouldn’t describe the scenery or the background or the actions that they’re taking, if one of them is if it’s a cartoon and one of the actors is hitting the other one with the hammer or something. That would need to be conveyed in a caption. Captions do both. They do dialogue and they do descriptions of the actions that are happening in there as well.
There are two ways that you can provide captions for the videos on your site. One of them is to have baked in text, or always on captions. These are great. I see these actually most often. But the other way, and these are sometimes provided by a YouTube embed, closed captions.
Closed captions are a way to collapse or turn off those captions for users who don’t need them. A lot of times if you can find them, YouTube will provide the button for you and it’s just a little CC square, usually in the bottom right hand corner of the video, although that could change based on, you know whether it’s Vimeo or YouTube. But these are great too and that actually qualifies as being compliant for the purposes of 1.2.2. So whether you provide them yourself or whether you are embedding content that provides that for you, it is important to note that they need to be there.
I often get asked who’s responsibility it is to provide captions for these videos. On one hand is the responsibility of the person who made the video and uploaded it to YouTube? Or is it the responsibility of the person using the video on their website? In an ideal world, all kinds of creators would be accessibility aware and they would provide captions for their videos when on upload. But that is not the situation, unfortunately. So, whenever you’re using content and putting it on your website, it is your responsibility to make sure that that video has captions where you’re using it. If you are presenting it on your website, you need to be responsible for putting those captions there for the users to visit your site.
And with that, we have completed another article from WCAG accessibility guidelines. I’m Josh with Online ADA and I will see you in the next video.