Re: captions accessibility with screen readers.

As mentioned by Jonathan earlier in the thread, the use case here is for presentation on other devices. I agree that, usually, merely reproducing as audio a text equivalent of content that was already audio isn’t a helpful round-trip, but making it available on a Braille display, say, could be useful. Users who do not want their screen reader to read the live areas can switch it off, though possibly that is an unhelpfully broad brush to use here. I believe Voiceover on Safari does play back captions presented this way on a Braille display, for example, if one is connected.

There’s a whole other class of usage by the way, which is accessibility via translation, in which making translation subtitles available to the screen reader is really helpful for people who cannot read the on-screen presentation.

Kind regards,

Nigel


On 17 Dec 2018, at 13:11, Bim Egan <bim.egan1@gmail.com<mailto:bim.egan1@gmail.com>> wrote:

I strongly disagree. trying to use any alert to force captions to be announced through screenreaders is likely to do more harm than good. Captions are for people with hearing disabilities. If screenreaders can't avoid announcing them, their users would be subjected to the synthetic voice speaking over the audio track.

I can see a use case for where text is only visually displayed or an informative image is used without narration, but the caption isn't the right mechanism for this, a more appropriate solution would be an audio description.

As it is, some screenreader browser combinations or particular implementations of video players do set the screenreader announcing captions or alternatively giving a running update of the current position, both of which are extremely distracting and make the video less, not more informative and enjoyable.

Bim


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________________________________
From: Nigel Megitt [mailto:nigel.megitt@bbc.co.uk]
Sent: 17 December 2018 11:30
To: Sean Murphy (seanmmur)
Cc: W3C WAI ig
Subject: Re: captions accessibility with screen readers.


Yes they should, in my opinion, role=“alert” aria-live="assertive”.  If you’re watching video with captions, you’re probably not interacting with the rest of the page so much. However I can see that there may be a case here for changing this depending on whether the video is full screen or not. Certainly in the case of a page with a whole bunch of captioned videos, if more than one is playing simultaneously, this would be a usability nightmare (think social media pages with lots of videos embedded), so something more subdued is needed. I don’t think I’ve seen a UX pattern for this that really works yet, but I’d like to learn more about how this might be possible.

On 17 Dec 2018, at 04:49, Sean Murphy (seanmmur) <seanmmur@cisco.com<mailto:seanmmur@cisco.com>> wrote:

Thoughts from the wider community.
I am wanting to bounce something off the community in relation to accessible media controls. Should the captions be accessible to a screen reader? When the caption is, the useability of the web page and general usage suffers due to much information.
So should the captions be accessible by a screen reader? If so, what ARIA property should be used? As ARIA-live=”polite” is to verbose.
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