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Captions controllable

supplemental

Normative Text

A mechanism is available to turn captions on and off.

Except when

  • Captions are hard coded into the video content.
Tests

This section is non-normative.

Procedure

For each caption:

  1. Check that content with captions provides a mechanism to turn on and off the captions. Expected results
  • #1 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.

actively available

available for the user to perceive and use

ASCII art

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

assistive technology

hardware and/or software that acts as a user agent, or along with a mainstream user agent, to provide functionality to meet the requirements of users with disabilities that go beyond those offered by mainstream user agents

Functionality provided by assistive technology includes alternative presentations (e.g., as synthesized speech or magnified content), alternative input methods (e.g., voice), additional navigation or orientation mechanisms, and content transformations (e.g., to make tables more accessible).

Assistive technologies often communicate data and messages with mainstream user agents by using and monitoring APIs.

The distinction between mainstream user agents and assistive technologies is not absolute. Many mainstream user agents provide some features to assist individuals with disabilities. The basic difference is that mainstream user agents target broad and diverse audiences that usually include people with and without disabilities. Assistive technologies target narrowly defined populations of users with specific disabilities. The assistance provided by an assistive technology is more specific and appropriate to the needs of its target users. The mainstream user agent may provide important functionality to assistive technologies like retrieving web content from program objects or parsing markup into identifiable bundles.

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.

conformance scope

A set of Views and/or Pages selected to be part of a conformance claim. Where a View or Page is part of a Process, all the Views or Pages in the process must be included.

How a person or organization selects the set is not defined in WCAG3. There maybe informative guidance on selecting a suitable set in future (similar to WCAG-EM), but regional laws or regulations may provide a methodology.

content

information, sensory experience and interactions conveyed

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

See also sign language.

mechanism

process or technique for achieving a result

The mechanism may be explicitly provided in the content, or may be relied upon to be provided by either the platform or by user agents, including assistive technologies.

The mechanism needs to meet all requirements for the conformance level claimed.

non-text content

any content that is not a sequence of characters that can be programmatically determinable or where the sequence is not expressing something in human language

This includes ASCII art (which is a pattern of characters), emoticons, leetspeak (which uses character substitution), and images representing text

page

non-embedded resource obtained from a single URI using HTTP plus any other resources that are used in the rendering or intended to be rendered together

Where a URI is available and represents a unique set of content, that would be the preferred conformance unit.

platform

software, or collection of layers of software, that lies below the subject software and provides services to the subject software and that allows the subject software to be isolated from the hardware, drivers, and other software below

Platform software both makes it easier for subject software to run on different hardware, and provides the subject software with many services (e.g. functions, utilities, libraries) that make the subject software easier to write, keep updated, and work more uniformly with other subject software.

A particular software component might play the role of a platform in some situations and a client in others. For example a browser is a platform for the content of the page but it also relies on the operating system below it.

The platform is the context in which the conformance scope exists.

process

series of views or pages associated with user actions, where actions required to complete an activity are performed, often in a certain order, regardless of the technologies used or whether it spans different sites or domains

programmatically determinable

meaning of the content and all its important attributes can be determined by software functionality that is accessibility supported

sign language

a language using combinations of movements of the hands and arms, facial expressions, or body positions to convey meaning

text

sequence of characters that can be programmatically determined, where the sequence is expressing something in human language

text alternative

text that is programmatically associated with non-text content or referred to from text that is programmatically associated with non-text content

user agent

any software that retrieves and presents web content for users

video

the technology of moving or sequenced pictures or images

Video can be made up of animated or photographic images, or both.

view

content that is actively available in a viewport including that which can be scrolled or panned to, and any additional content that is included by expansion while leaving the rest of the content in the viewport actively available

A modal dialog box would constitute a new view because the other content in the viewport is no longer actively available.

viewport

object in which the platform presents content

The author has no control of the viewport and almost always has no idea what is presented in a viewport (e.g. what is on screen) because it is provided by the platform. On browsers the hardware platform is isolated from the content.

Content can be presented through one or more viewports. Viewports include windows, frames, loudspeakers, and virtual magnifying glasses. A viewport may contain another viewport. For example, nested frames. Interface components created by the user agent such as prompts, menus, and alerts are not viewports.