Captions consistent

supplemental

Normative Text

Captions are presented consistently throughout the media, and across related productions, unless exceptions are essential. This includes consistent styling and placement of the captions text and consistent methods for identifying speakers, languages, and sounds.

Tests

This section is non-normative.

Procedure

For each media asset with audio content:

Play the media with captions on.
Check that the captions are presented consistently throughout the audio content.

Expected results

#2 is true.

Tests

This content needs to be written.

Key Terms

accessibility support set

group of user agents and assistive technologies you test with

The AGWG is considering defining a default set of user agents and assistive technologies that they use when validating guidelines.

Accessibility support sets may vary based on language, region, or situation.

If you are not using the default accessibility set, the conformance report should indicate what set is being used.

accessibility supported

available and working in the user agents and assistive technology in the accessibility support set

The working group intended to include a default accessibility support set. See Default accessibility support set #277.

ASCII art

picture created by a spatial arrangement of characters or glyphs (typically from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII)

audio

live or recorded sound signal

audio description

narration added to the soundtrack to describe important visual details that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone

For audiovisual media, audio description provides information about actions, characters, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content.

Audio description is also sometimes called “video description”, “described video”, “visual description”, or “descriptive narration”.

In standard audio description, narration is added during existing pauses in dialogue. See also extended audio description.

If all important visual information is already provided in the main audio track, no additional audio description track is necessary.

captions

synchronized visual and/or text alternative for both the speech and non-speech audio portion of a work of audiovisual content

Closed captions are equivalents that can be turned on and off with some players and can often be read using assistive technology.

Open captions are any captions that cannot be turned off in the player. For example, if the captions are visual equivalent images of text embedded in video.

Audio descriptions can be, but do not need to be, captioned since they are descriptions of information that is already presented visually.

In some countries, captions are called subtitles. The term ‘subtitles’ is often also used to refer to captions that present a translated version of the audio content.

content

information, sensory experience and interactions conveyed

essential to outcome

always necessary to achieve the same result

If something is essential to the outcome then: If it were removed, the information or functionality of the content would be fundamentally changed, and the information and functionality cannot be achieved in another way that would conform

extended audio description

audio description that is added to audiovisual media by pausing the video to allow for additional time to fit in the audio description

This technique is only used when the sense of the video would be lost without the additional audio description and the pauses between dialogue or narration are too short.

human language

language that is spoken, written, or signed (through visual or tactile means) to communicate with humans