Description
Resource URL
https://www.w3.org/WAI/media/av/planning/#checklist
Description
I like this page. It's one of my favorites. Then I realized that there's something I don't understand: the "video without audio" case, as it relates to audio description, and the relationship between the "Checklists for Audio and Video" section on this page and the "WCAG Standard" section.
Please allow me to share my thought process, and where it goes off the rails.
Starting with the "WCAG Standard" section: this makes sense to me. If I go to WCAG Standard > Pre-Recorded and look at the table there, and look at the row "Video-only", and ignore AAA for the purpose of this conversation, I see the text "A 1.2.1 (transcript or audio track)" and "A 1.2.1 (audio track or transcript)" which I can condense into the advice: I need either a transcript or an audio track for my "video without audio".
I think that "audio track" is close enough to "audio description" in this situation that the distinction isn't important. So what I take from the table is: I need either a transcript or an audio description for my "video without audio". (Again, ignoring AAA.)
Now I go to the "Checklists for Audio and Video" section of the page, and I read: "The checklists below cover audio-only content and video content..." I wondered: does "video content" mean 1) "both video with audio and video without audio" or 2) "video with audio"? The first time I read it, I thought it meant (1). Then I scrolled down to the sub-section "Video Checklists", then to the question "Does the video have visual information that is needed to understand the content?" I thought of my "video without audio", which definitely has such visual information. So when I read "If yes ... Audio description of the visual information (AA)" I got confused, because this seemed to contradict the table I read earlier. The table said that I need either a transcript or an audio description. The table did not say that I definitely need audio description. So I back-tracked, and I figured: maybe I was wrong earlier in my guess as to the meaning of "video content". That is: maybe "video content" means option (2) above. That is: "video content" must mean "video with audio", and does not cover "video without audio". That would agree with the my interpretation of the success criteria, and it would make the table and the checklist agree with each other.
If my logic is sound, and my confusion might also be experienced by other people, then these steps would prevent it:
- Change "The checklists below cover audio-only content and video content" to "The checklists below cover audio-only content and video with audio content".
- Change "Video Checklists" to "Video with Audio Checklists"
- We might also add a new sub-section called "Video-only Checklists", and create some new content to go in it.
Let me know what you all think, especially if my logic is not sound, and I need WCAG lessons more than I need to be creating WAI website github issues ;)
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