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Provide audio descriptions for visual content

Providing a verbal description of important visual details, actions, and scenes that are essential for understanding the content.

Provide audio descriptions for visual content

Shawn Sandy (Ally.Cafe) ~

WCAG 2.2 Guideline 1.2.5 (AA)

The Audio Description (Prerecorded) guideline requires that prerecorded audio content in synchronized media provides an audio description of the video content. An audio description is a narration that describes important visual details that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone. This helps users who are blind or have low vision to better understand the content.

Purpose: The purpose of this guideline is to ensure that users who cannot perceive visual information can still access and understand the content through audio descriptions.

How it Applies: This guideline applies to prerecorded audio-visual content, such as movies, TV shows, and online videos. It does not apply to live audio-visual content or audio-only content.

Best Practices:

  • Provide an audio description track that describes relevant visual information, such as actions, characters, scene changes, and on-screen text.
  • The audio description should be clear, concise, and objective, without personal interpretation or commentary.
  • The audio description should be timed to fit between the existing dialogue or narration, without overlapping or obscuring important audio content.
  • Provide a mechanism for users to turn the audio description on or off, such as a separate audio track or a user setting.

Example:

<video controls>
  <source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  <track kind="descriptions" src="descriptions.vtt" srclang="en" label="English Audio Description">
  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

In this example, the <track> element provides an audio description track in WebVTT format for the video. The kind="descriptions" attribute indicates that it is an audio description track, and the srclang="en" attribute specifies the language as English.

Resources:

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