Descriptions or text alternatives for prerecorded media
Silktide finds the audio and video players on your pages so you can confirm that prerecorded videos offer either an audio description or a full text alternative. Only a person can verify that one of these exists and covers the content.
Why this matters
People who cannot see a video need its visual information delivered another way. success criterion 1.2.3 (Level A) accepts either route: an narrating the important visuals, or a -style text alternative describing both what is said and what happens on screen.
Without one of the two, anything your video communicates visually - actions, demonstrations, on-screen text - is simply lost to part of your audience.
How to fix it
Findings from this check are prompts to verify, not confirmed failures. For each video reported:
- Watch it and note any important information that is only visible, not spoken.
- If there is none, or the video is itself an alternative for text already on the page, it passes; the finding.
- Otherwise provide one of the two alternatives:
- a full text alternative on or linked from the page, covering dialogue, meaningful sounds, and visual events in order, or
- an audio description track or re-edit, as described in Descriptions for prerecorded media.
A text alternative is usually cheaper to produce and also helps search engines and people who prefer reading.
How Silktide tests this
- Find the video and audio players in each page's own , skipping any elements you have excluded from checking.
- Ignore media that is permanently muted, which cannot be conveying audio information.
- Also report links that go directly to videos on known external video platforms.
- Report each remaining player for you to confirm one of the alternatives is provided - Silktide cannot watch the media or judge whether nearby text covers it.
Troubleshooting
There is a transcript right next to the video
Silktide cannot reliably recognise that nearby text is a full equivalent of the video, so the finding is still shown. Verify the text covers the visual content as well as the dialogue, then approve the finding.
My video is not detected
Silktide finds media players in the page's own HTML and direct links to known video platforms. Videos embedded through frames from other services may not be detected, but the requirement still applies to them.