WCAG Requirements Overview

Now short tangent on the WCAG requirements. So everything about media is basically covered by

1.2 time-based media, 1.4 distinguishable and 2.2 enough time. So these are the WCAG

guidelines for that mostly apply to, to video and audio content. And to make this like harder

to understand, there is a little bit of recap lingo that we need to talk about. Because otherwise,

It's just too hard to follow. And there are basically five terms that we need to talk about.

The first one is pre-recorded. Anything that is pre-recorded is anything that is not live,

or what we would call recorded. So if you publish a video on YouTube, if you, you know, this

is a pre-recorded video um and it's not not live then there's live uh which is

basically means what it says that's why i put the life there uh as the definition uh basically

but it's happening at the same time as the broadcast so if i was live streaming this

to the internet, then this would be a live audio. But I'm not, so this doesn't apply.

Then there is audio only, and that's media that only includes audio. So that is all media that

has no visuals or no visuals that matter. So what I mean by that is, if you have an audio that is a

podcast or an audiobook, you don't have visuals with it that happen at the same time. So they

are not connected. The same if you have like a voiceover and there is like, I don't know,

there's a visualization in the background, like you often have that when you share

stuff from your podcast app, you can create little visualizations. They have nothing to do really

with the the content. So that's all considered audio only. And

then you have video only, which is the same thing. Only the

opposite. So this is content that only includes video. So no

audio, no spoken text, no music, nothing like that. There is

probably could use music, but you want to say like, Oh, this

includes music. And then there's synchronized media. This is WCAG language for media that

includes audio and video. Basically when two sets of media are happening at the same time

and they depend on each other. You have dialogue and you want to see the person speaking move their

mouth, then that is synchronized media. A certain part of the audio needs to happen at

the certain time that some video happens and that's synchronized.

For the requirements, I just skip really quickly over these tables because I think they're more

distracting than useful. So these are the requirements for pre-recorded media and these

are the requirements for live media. You see that for live there's a lot less to do. And for

pre-recorded media there are more things you should do, including some WCAG AAA success criteria. But

we will talk about those at the end of the video. I don't want to distract from this, but you will

see these tables in your reading. And you will say, well, what's going on here? So yeah, these

are the requirements. It's not super clear. And yeah, it can be a little bit distracting.

Requirements for live media. I already talked about that. And this is where WCAG's focus on

testing is not super useful because yeah, you have to test all these success criteria,

but in reality, understanding what the needs are, we have already talked about that.

And then seeing which features do apply to those needs is much more important.

And there are basically four ways to address the needs of users in regards to media.

Now, we will mostly talk about the first three, which is scripts and transcripts, captions and audio descriptions.

And the reason is, if we go back to WCAG, sign language is only a AAA criteria for synchronized audio and video.

And it's not even needed for live media at all.

So, um, sign language basically does not play a role when testing for WCAG.

Still super important.

I wish we had more, um, regulation that says, hey, use...