Alternative text for live audio
Silktide finds the audio and video players on your pages so you can confirm that live audio-only broadcasts, such as radio streams, offer an equivalent in text. Whether a stream is live and what accompanies it can only be verified by a person.
Why this matters
Live audio-only content - internet radio, live podcast sessions, event commentary - is completely inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing unless the same information is available as text in real-time. That can be live captioning of the stream, a continuously updated text summary, or for scripted broadcasts, the script itself.
This requirement comes from success criterion 1.2.9, which applies at - the strictest conformance level, beyond what most organisations target.
How to fix it
Findings from this check are prompts to verify, not confirmed failures. For each player reported:
- Check whether it carries live audio-only content. Pre-recorded audio is covered by Text alternative for pre-recorded audio instead, and passes this check; the finding.
- For genuine live audio, provide a real-time text equivalent: live , a live service, or a link to the script for scripted broadcasts.
- Make the text alternative easy to find from the same page as the stream.
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, and media that already includes a
text track (a
<track>element). - Also report links that go directly to videos on known external video platforms.
- Report each remaining player for you to confirm a live text alternative exists where relevant - Silktide cannot tell live from prerecorded content or evaluate a live text feed.
Troubleshooting
Nothing on my website is live
Then nothing fails this criterion - review the reported players once, confirm they only carry pre-recorded media, and approve the findings.