Why Audio Descriptions Matter

I’m a front-end architect. Elyse Holladay describes it really well.

I’m also an accessibility savant. I never bothered to read — let alone understand — engineering specs before I started reading the accessibility guidelines for WCAG2. Things that seemed obtuse and wordy became clear and concise. One of those things is audio descriptions.

These are not audio captions, they’re another audio track entirely. The example I use is two persons having a heated conversation. The dialogue is tracked with the closed caption, but what happens when Person A makes a rude gesture or wrinkles up their face?

Without an audio description to call out Person A’s non-verbal slight, a blind user would have no idea why Person B was suddenly so irate.

Audio descriptions are a WCAG2 Level AA requirement, but are not supported by any browsers save the latest version of Microsoft Edge. Video players like Video.js, my personal fave, have them on the roadmap, but not currently implemented.

Video takes work to be accessible. At the least, video ought to have:

1. Full-text transcripts

2. Closed captions (WebVTT)

3. Web audio descriptions

This is a high bar, but it’s not an impasse. As web professionals, we have an obligation to drive innovation without sacrificing accessibility. The web that matters most is the one that’s available to all.