Provide open captions burned into the video
Captions burned into the picture, always visible, needing nothing at all from the player. G93 is that route, and W3C counts it as sufficient for the prerecorded captions rule at Level A on its own, and for the live captions rule at Level AA when it is paired with real-time transcription. Its advantage is that it never fails to turn up. No caption button to find, no player that dropped the track, no platform that strips text tracks on upload. The cost is that nobody can turn those captions off, resize them or restyle them. Captions are also not subtitles, and that difference is not cosmetic. Subtitles carry dialogue in another language. Captions carry dialogue and the sounds that matter in the same language, which is the thing deaf viewers actually need.
How we find it in an audit
Where captions are burned in, a reviewer watches with any closed-caption track switched off and checks the words are still there, because a video can carry both and the page can be relying on the wrong one. Then the same checks as for any captions. Whether every speaker is identified, whether sounds carrying meaning are captioned, and whether the text stays legible at phone size and inside the area social platforms crop to. Social cuts get their own pass, since that is where burned-in captions earn their keep and where they most often get cropped away.
How affected users experience it
A deaf viewer meeting an uncaptioned video has no route in at all, and the sound is where most of the content usually lives. Open captions remove every step between them and the words. Nothing to enable, nothing to configure, nothing to lose when a platform re-encodes the file. The trade is that a viewer who wants bigger captions, or a different color, or none at all, has no way to get any of it, which is why the closed-caption route still has a place beside this one.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
The social cut ships with legible open captions inside the safe area, and the site player keeps a closed track as well.
Fails
Videos posted through an embed widget strip text tracks, so the caption file exists and never renders.
How this gets tested
The W3C publishes test rules that define what a checker looks for here.
- Video element auditory content has accessible alternativeA tool finds candidates, you decide
Other ways to satisfy this rule
8 guides on this site are filed under 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded). W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule on its own. Implement it correctly, in a way your readers' software actually supports, and the rule is met.
- G87sufficientAdd captions to every video with speech
- H95sufficientAdd caption tracks to your videos
- SM11sufficientAdd caption text streams in SMIL 1.0
- SM12sufficientAdd caption text streams in SMIL 2.0
- F8failureDo not publish captions that skip dialogue
- F74failureDo not leave a media alternative unlabeled
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique G93: Providing open (always visible) captions. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.