Media alternatives style guide
Normative Text
[Title, role, or organization] asserts that:
- Our organization has a style guide that includes guidance on media alternatives and a policy and/or processes that the style guide must be followed
Information that needs to be included publicly:
- Title, role or organization making the assertion (if different from the conformance claim).
- Date of when the style guide was published.
- Date of assertion (if different from the date of the conformance claim).
Recommended internal documentation (Informative):
- Summary of the needs of users involved.
- Identified issues and details of solutions applied.
- Section labels relevant to image alternatives, or
- Copy or snapshot of the style guide
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
- descriptive transcript
a text version of the speech and non-speech audio information and visual information needed to understand the content
- 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.
- guideline
high-level, plain-language outcome statements used to organize requirements
Guidelines provide a high-level, plain-language outcome statements for managers, policy makers, individuals who are new to accessibility, and other individuals who need to understand the concepts but not dive into the technical details. They provide an easy-to-understand way of organizing and presenting the requirements so that non-experts can learn about and understand the concepts.
Each guideline includes a unique, descriptive name along with a high-level plain-language summary. Guidelines address functional needs on specific topics, such as contrast, forms, readability, and more.
Guidelines group related requirements and are technology-independent.
- human language
language that is spoken, written, or signed (through visual or tactile means) to communicate with humans
See also sign language.
- media alternative
alternative formats, usually text, for audio, video, and audio-video content including captions, audio descriptions, and descriptive transcripts
- 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
- programmatically determinable
meaning of the content and all its important attributes can be determined by software functionality that is accessibility supported
- requirement
result of practices that reduce or eliminate barriers that people with disabilities experience
- section
self-contained portion of content that deals with one or more related topics or thoughts
A section may consist of one or more paragraphs and include graphics, tables, lists and sub-sections.
- 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
- video
the technology of moving or sequenced pictures or images
Video can be made up of animated or photographic images, or both.