Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded)

Why it matters

The soundtrack of most marketing and tutorial video assumes you can see the screen. "Click here." "As you can see." "This one." Prices and offers often appear only as text laid over the picture. A blind viewer hears a video-shaped gap where that information should be, with no way to work out what was missed. The fix is usually cheap. Most of the time it means saying out loud what the video already shows. It reaches further than the audience it was written for, too. Anyone who finds moving images hard to interpret gets the same benefit, and so does anyone listening with their eyes on something else.

Who this rule protects

Blind and low-vision viewers hear the soundtrack and miss the on-screen text, the actions and the context a sighted viewer picks up without noticing. People with cognitive disabilities who find it hard to work out what is happening on screen benefit from hearing the same thing named aloud.

How to check it yourself

1. 1Watch each video with your eyes closed and ask whether the audio alone told you everything a sighted viewer received.
2. 2List anything that appears only on screen, meaning phone numbers, prices, steps, product names and web addresses. Then check whether each one is ever spoken.
3. 3Where the audio leaves gaps, look for a described version of the video or a full text alternative on or near the page.
4. 4Read the text alternative, if that is the route taken. It has to run in the video's own order, transcribe all the dialogue, and describe the non-speech sounds as well as the pictures.
5. 5Where the video asks the viewer to do something, check the text version offers a working way to do it, usually a link.
6. 6Confirm the description is in the same language as the video, or as the page it sits on. The standard accepts either, so a subtitled foreign-language clip on an English page is not automatically wrong.

Failures we see most often

• A tutorial says "click here, then this one" while the screen shows which buttons, and nothing else ever names them.
• A promo states its offer only as text over music, so a blind shopper never learns there was an offer.
• A text alternative summarizes what happens instead of following the video's order, so a listener cannot line the two up.
• A text alternative covers the dialogue and skips the visuals, which makes it a transcript rather than an alternative to the video.
• A demonstration runs under wall-to-wall narration with no pauses, and no described version or text alternative is offered instead.
• The narration describes the screen in a language that matches neither the video nor the page it sits on.

Who this one is for

Read from this rule's own note above, so the grouping and the note cannot disagree.

• Blind and screen reader userspeople who cannot see the screen
• Low visionpeople who can see the screen but not easily
• Cognitive and learningpeople for whom the difficulty is understanding, remembering, or staying with it

How this one is tested

We list 1 ACT rule against 1.2.3. Each one defines exactly what a checker looks at, which is how automated tools decide what to flag. Each one also checks a slice, so passing every rule here is not the same as meeting the criterion, and a rule can be proposed rather than approved or need a person to finish it. The note beside each says which.

• Video element visual content has accessible alternativeA tool finds candidates, you decide

How to fix it

• Write the description into the script. Have the narrator name what they are showing as they show it, and the video needs no separate track at all. This is the cheapest route by a wide margin, and it only works before you shoot.
• For one person talking to camera against a background that does not change, a static text description is enough on its own, and it costs an afternoon. It has to carry what only ever appears on screen, meaning the title card, the name strip and the credits, and it has to be tied to the video in code rather than sitting loose beside it. The route stops working the moment a second speaker is identified by an on-screen caption, which is most testimonial reels.
• Where the picture moves faster than the dialogue pauses allow, write a full text alternative instead. At Level A that is a complete answer rather than a compromise.
• If you expect to claim Level AA, choose the audio route now. Meeting this rule with a description also meets 1.2.5. Meeting it with text leaves 1.2.5 still to buy.

Passes vs. fails