accessibility-guidelines

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Captions for live videos and presentations

On this page:

• Summary
• Requirements
• More info

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Summary

Provide captions for videos and presentations that are performed live.

Live broadcast video must have captions that are synchronised with the audio content of the video.

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Requirements

• All live video content has captions that are synchronised with the audio content of the video.

Common mistakes

• The live video does not have synchronised captions;
• The live video has captions but they are not synchronised with the audio content of the video.

Why?

This ensures that the information communicated by the audio part of the video is available to people who can’t hear it.

Official wording in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

1.2.4 Captions (Live): Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media. (Level AA)

See the W3C’s detailed explanation of this guideline with techniques and examples.

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More info

Sources

• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1
• Government Digital Service WCAG 2.1 Primer

Useful resources

• What are captions? on the Nomensa blog
• Sounding out the web: accessibility for Deaf and hard of hearing people (Part 2) by The Paciello Group

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