Captions

And that brings us to captions. Captions, you probably use them, are visual textual information

that reflect auditory information in the video. So this is again, pretty similar to what we just did

with our transcripts. This is all sounds that are in the video are reflected as captions on the

screen and generally those captions are on screen at the bottom and you can read them there.

A lot of people are using this for foreign language movies, but it's obviously an important

part if you can't hear what's going on in the video. Just a quick note on captions versus

subtitles. In Europe, you can just use subtitles as the word in English and that means in US English,

and that means also in WCAG. Captions are subtitles with the same language as the source audio. So if

you have an English product, then the captions are also English and subtitles are foreign language

subtitles. So if you have, I don't know, a Japanese anime, and you watch it with English

subtitles, then they are subtitles and not captions, because the language is different.

It's like a minor difference. But you know, some people are pedantic about that. So just,

I always say captions usually for accessibility, I usually say captions. That clears up most of the things. Example is again the TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee. So I can switch on what they call subtitles. That's why I put that slide in here. In here and I can just say I want English. Subtitles. Not super easy to do.

to switch on. But when I do that, basically what is here in the transcript then becomes visible on the screen.

For someone who talks and thinks as fast as Tim Berners-Lee, super useful to have a transcript, I tell you.

So yeah, that's how captions look.

And the nice thing about captions is that they are super useful to have them,

especially for, as I said, people who don't understand the language very well,

but also for people who can't hear what is said.

There are a couple of best practices here in this Smashing Magazine article, which is super new.

It's from January 11th.

And basically, hey, they have the same example that I had.

And they go into detail what you can do when you're actively producing subtitles.

This is usually not what we do when we do testing.

We just say, like, there are no subtitles or the subtitles don't match up what is said in the video or other things like that.

So that would be classical fails for WCAG success criteria.

And there are subtitled formatting conventions and stuff like that.

It's really, really good.

It's a nice little article on what's going on.

And I really like that.

So next time when you are watching something on a streaming service,

like Disney Plus or Apple TV Plus, they have exceptionally good captions, but also audio descriptions.

So if you are looking into that, that is a homework I can do.

Watch your favorite TV show with subtitles and audio descriptions.

And for captions, you can just use the track element in HTML.

So using, in this case, WebVTT formatted file, putting that in.

Again, usually you don't test for that.

You look for a closed caption button.

You click on it and you can then see if you have it.

And then the VTT file in this case looks like this.

There are a couple of different formats out there.

There's WebVTT, then there's SRT.

Doesn't really matter in practice for testing.

Basically, what falls out of your process, you can use that.

Usually just upload it and refer it from the track element.

One thing that I don't have a slide about, but that is important, is open captions versus closed captions, because this is a little bit confusing.

What we have here that the captions are there and you can open and close them or switch them on and off, which is not the easiest thing to do, that is called closed captioning.

If the subtitles were built into the video and you could not switch them on and off, then those would be open captions.

It's very confusing.

I don't like that it is this way.

but it is. So closed captioning is usually what you want. According to WCAG, having open captions

is not a failure. So you can do that. But if you have the option to have closed captions,

see, it's hard. If you have the option to have closed captions,

then use closed captions that you can switch on and off.