Users with hearing impairments may rely on captions to enjoy your video content. Adding captions to live videos helps people use your website when you’re streaming live video.
How to pass
Add captions to live video.
Tips
Include presenter cues and important sound effects as well as dialogue.
YouTube Live and Facebook Live both now offer closed captions as long as you use certain captioning tools such as Total Eclipse, Case CATalyst, CaptionMaker or StreamText.Net.
You may want to hire someone to type quickly for you – check out freelance websites.
This is a difficult guideline to meet. Broadcasters like the BBC hire professional subtitlers to add captions to live television.
Now you’ve read up on 1.2.4 - Captions (Live), join the discussion at wuhcag.com. Myself and the Wuhcag community are always on hand to help with questions and we’d love to learn your tips and tricks for this guideline.
This is our first look at a Level AA guideline, but it’s one I’ve always felt belongs in AAA. It is technologically and financially difficult to comply with this guidelines and for many will it prevent them from reaching AA if they use live video. That said, producing live video that users with hearing impairments can’t enjoy is hardly a good option. I hope automatic captioning technology develops quickly, especially for social media channels like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok where most of the content is video.
Before I go, thank you for bearing with me during my absence in March - it’s been great to hear from you all. Rest assured I am well and now in a position where I can continue to work on my new WCAG 2.1 book and get back on track with this weekly discussion.
Luke