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Re: Audio description and captions

for

From: Mallory
Date: Feb 9, 2024 10:21PM


Hm. People who use captions expect captions to be captions and do captioning--and remember that sometimes there's a lot of spoken text, sounds and music that need to be in those captions. Sometimes it's hard to read fast enough (and I'm a regular caption user and feel I'm used to it and do pretty well). AD is, sorry, a superbuttload of text. Even if your video is "simple" enough that you can keep to sticking to 2 lines (3 max!) of text at a time and even if the text is rolling, do you then need to go twice as fast in replacing that text because it's the AD (which by necessity is wordy as hell)? We already can't do much for caption users who are slow/poor readers. Having the captions BE the AD makes that problem worse. Or you can make twice the work and have two captions: real captions and AD captions. I don't like that idea but I'm sure there's content out there that would benefit from it. There's always something weird in the world.

I agree and like the mention earlier of transcripts including what's mentioned in the AD, although that does deviate from the "traditional" use of transcripts and may make it closer to a screenplay, but fully agree with the idea that a transcript including the AD text allows the video's full information be accessible via transcript.

On Fri, Feb 9, 2024, at 10:01 PM, Andrews, David B (DEED) via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> I think the answer is no. The intended audience for each service is
> intended for a different audience and there isn't much cross-over.
> Think about how best to serve your audience -- not just how to conform
> to the standard.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
> Steve Green
> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2024 5:41 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Audio description and captions
>
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> >
> Thanks, Patrick. Anyone have a contrary view?
>
> Steve
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
> Patrick H. Lauke
> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2024 11:34 AM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Audio description and captions
>
> On 29/01/2024 11:19, Steve Green wrote:
>> This may be a silly question. In short, if an audio described version of a video is provided, do the captions need to include the audio description?
>
> While it may seem redundant, I'd say the easiest interpretation is that
> yes, all AD content should also be captioned - if something's spoken
> (regardless of whether it's the original video's audio, or additional
> AD), caption it, as I don't think there's enough normative text that
> would warrant a more nuanced "but surely the AD is redundant since they
> can see the visuals" logical exemption (though I may be wrong?)
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
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> * https://github.com/patrickhlauke
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>
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