RE: When is something a web app and when is it synchronized media

The extent to which this is a problem depends on your context. If you are testing your own website you can interpret the SCs any way you like and you don't have to justify it to anyone.

However, if you're testing websites for other people, as some of us do, you have to be able to justify your findings because they may have a significant cost implication for your client. You may even need to tell them they cannot do things they want to do. And if they don't act on your recommendations, you need to tell them they cannot claim WCAG conformance. You therefore need to have a very high level of confidence that you are applying the SCs correctly. The ambiguity in the definition of synchronised media means that I do not have that confidence.

There are ambiguities in several WCAG success criteria, but this one has more impact than most because of the cost and logistical complexity of remediation if captioning, transcripts or audio description are required.

Steve


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> 
Sent: 24 July 2020 18:31
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: When is something a web app and when is it synchronized media

On 24/07/2020 17:03, Steve Green wrote:
> I know very well what audio-to-video synchronization is in a non-WCAG context. The problem is that everyone in the WebAIM discussion (except me) is of the view that the WCAG are using the phrase to mean something else.

For context, the thread in question
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=9802


> The WCAG could very easily have adopted the Wikipedia definition or any other definition, but they didn't. Instead, they contain their own vague definition whose meaning we cannot agree on. As a result, there are problems with applying the relevant success criteria regardless of which definition you believe.

In the case of "a/v file where the video part is just visual fluff and all the content is the audio/narration", interpreting this as synchronised or not makes the difference between whether you should use captions and audio description or if you can just use a transcript.

If treating as synchronised, you could provide a transcript and then exempt the file from needing actual captions on the grounds that, since the video part is not that relevant, the file is essentially a media alternative to the transcript. And you could also pass or N/A the visual fluff portion from needing an audio description, since it's not conveying actual relevant content (if it truly is just "fluff").

Yes there is some latitude in interpretation here, most likely. But I wouldn't sweat it and instead either way focus on the end result (that both users that can't see the video, and users that can't hear the audio, in the end get the same experience).

But yes, the whole suite of audio, video, synchronized media etc SCs is a bit of a convoluted mess, in my view...I won't disagree

https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/782

https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/795


P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Friday, 24 July 2020 17:49:33 UTC