Hey everybody. Josh here with Online ADA.
In this video we’re gonna cover article 1.2.3 of the WCAG accessibility guidelines.
This article is audio descriptions or media alternatives for pre-recorded content. This is going to be a level A compliant article and let’s jump right in.
An alternative for time based media or audio description of the pre-recorded video content is provided for synchronized media, except when the media is media alternative for text and it’s clearly labeled as such.
Just like always, they’re basically saying here that you don’t have to provide an audio description for audio descriptions. You don’t have to provide text alternatives for content that is a text alternative. There’s no need to be redundant there, you just have to clearly label it as such so that people understand what it’s there for.
This is an interesting article because they’re actually providing two options for how to meet compliance. Number one, you can do a text transcript. This is going to be a complete text version of everything that happens in the video, including dialogue, scene changes, any like logos that appear. Anytime someone does anything it is basically a screenplay or a book. It reads like that. You can even see, like, actor one and, like, their name colon and then like, in quotes the dialogue that they say, and then like the next line. It is just like a screenplay. This is probably the best way to meet compliance.
This is the best option here because you are not constrained by time. Whereas the alternative of the text transcript is the audio description. The audio description is basically some narrator who’s going to be describing what’s happening on the scene, in real time, as the video is playing, but they only do it during pauses in dialogue, which adds a constraint.
It’s not a bad thing by any means, and in fact audio description is one of the requirements for moving up in compliance to level AA, which is in a different article, but it is important to know that a lot of the 1.2 guidelines overlap a little bit and that’s because WCAG wants to give you a few different options on how to meet compliance because, I mean let’s face it, for providing this content for your videos is time consuming and it’s difficult. It’s not an easy process. It’s honestly best, if you’re producing your own content, you’re keeping accessibility in mind and if you are doing that then, you know a lot of times an audio description may not even be necessary. But it is still important to have some alternative for this content because people have all sorts of different disabilities and you wanna make sure you’re being accessible to as many audiences as you can.
So text alternative is the text transcript. Audio description, that’s gonna be a narrator reading out loud. There’s a really good example that is on the WCAG official documentation site. They have an authoring back best practices. I definitely advise that you go check that out and you can just even Google ‘what’s the difference between a text transcript closed captions and subtitles‘. An audio description is in there somewhere. If you Google that, you’ll come across the article that has the example of the Universal logo, circling around the world with the sun raising behind it and then you’ve got the gold letters that kind of circle around the globe. It’s a really cool audio and it gives you really clear idea of what this guideline is trying to achieve.
So, thank you for joining me on this video and I’m Josh with Online ADA, and we’ll see you in the next video.