9 of 86 rules
Deaf and hard of hearing
Anything the site says out loud has to exist somewhere else as well. Captions are the obvious answer and they are not the only one, because a transcript is not a caption, a caption is not sign language, and what you owe depends on what the media actually contains. Captions on prerecorded video sit at Level A, which is the floor every conformance target is built on, so there is no version of this you get to defer.
What tends to break
Video with no captions is the first failure and the easiest to spot. The second one is quieter. Auto-generated captions get published unread, and the machine mishears numbers and drops the word "not", so "broil on high for 4 to 5 minutes, you should not preheat the oven" arrives as "broil on high for 45 minutes, you should know to preheat the oven". After that it stops being the file and starts being the player. Captions nobody can switch on, resize or recolour are not captions in practice, and a service that needs somebody to speak to it shuts this audience out completely. One thing to get right about sign language. It sits at Level AAA, it serves one sign language at a time, and plenty of people who are deaf do not sign at all, particularly anybody who lost their hearing later in life. So a signed track is something you add to captions, never something you swap them for.
Level A, 4 rules
- 1.2.1 Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded)
Deaf and hard-of-hearing users cannot follow a podcast without a transcript. Blind users cannot follow a silent demo without narration or written steps. Deafblind users depend on the text version, because braille is the only route into either one. Anyone in a quiet office or a loud train reads the transcript too.
- 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded)
Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers rely on captions to follow the speech and everything else in the mix. People who take written information in better than spoken rely on the same text. So does anyone watching with the sound off, which on a phone in public is most people, most of the time.
- 1.4.2 Audio Control
Screen reader users are hit hardest, because the sound competes with the speech they navigate by. Users who are both blind and hard of hearing have no way out at all when the screen reader shares the system volume. People with attention or auditory processing difficulties lose their place the moment unexpected sound starts.
- 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable
This affects screen-reader users hearing a form one field at a time, slow typists, people with cognitive or motor disabilities, deaf users for whom the page text is a second language or who are working through a sign language interpreter, and anyone for whom a form takes longer than it did in the demo.
Level AA, 1 rule
- 1.2.4 Captions (Live)
Deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees depend on live captions most directly, because without them the event carries no content at all. Attendees who read faster than they listen use the same text. So does anyone joining from somewhere loud, or on a line that keeps cutting out.
Level AAA, 4 rules
No law names AAA as a blanket duty, but these are where the remaining barriers for people who cannot hear the audio usually sit.
- 1.2.6 Sign Language (Prerecorded)
Deaf people whose first language is a sign language are the ones this protects, and W3C notes plainly that some of them have limited reading ability, so captions do not reach them. Some viewers want captions and signing on screen at the same time.
- 1.2.9 Audio-only (Live)
Deaf and hard of hearing listeners need this most, along with anybody listening somewhere they cannot turn the sound on.
- 1.4.7 Low or No Background Audio
Hard of hearing listeners are the group W3C names, and they are the group who cannot separate speech from background sound by concentrating harder.
- 2.2.3 No Timing
W3C names blind readers first, then people with low vision, then people with cognitive limitations and people with motor impairments, and adds deaf readers for whom written text is a second language.
How this list was made
Each rule appears here because its own note about who it affects names people who cannot hear the audio. That keeps this page and the rule pages saying the same thing, and it makes the list narrower than every rule that could matter, because a rule helping these readers without saying so does not turn up. Start with this, then read the full Level AA set, which is what the laws actually name.
Other groups
- Blind and screen reader users40 rules
- Low vision35 rules
- Motor and keyboard-only33 rules
- Voice control13 rules
- Cognitive and learning50 rules
- Seizures and vestibular disorders4 rules