RE: Clarification of SC 1.2.3

From: Mike Elledge [mailto:melledge@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 2:59 PM
To: Jonathan Avila <jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com>; WCAG WG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>

One of the questions we were also discussing was whether transcripts were required if we had captions and an audio description. It doesn't seem like they would be necessary under WCAG 2.0, but they would improve accessibility for deaf/blind users.
[Jason] Captions satisfy 1.2.2. Audio descriptions satisfy the second disjunct of 1.2.3, hence there is no requirement at Level A for a transcript and the content can thus be inaccessible to users who are deaf-blind.
If I remember correctly, and I may be misremembering, I insisted during the development of WCAG 2.0 that this was a manifestly unfair exclusion. Unfortunately, my view did not prevail in the working group, one case that was sufficiently disappointing that I’m reasonably confident it happened, and haven’t forgotten despite the intervening years.
1.2.8 is at level AAA, with the result that Web sites that only aim to conform at Level AA still exclude deaf-blind users from their synchronized media content.

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