Text alternative for prerecorded audio
Silktide finds the audio and video players on your pages so you can confirm that prerecorded audio-only content, such as podcasts and recorded interviews, comes with a text version. Whether an equivalent text exists is something only a person can verify.
Why this matters
A podcast, audio guide, or recorded interview is inaudible content for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. A gives them the same information as everyone else - and benefits everyone: text can be skimmed, searched, quoted, translated, and indexed by search engines, which audio cannot.
This requirement comes from success criterion 1.2.1, which applies at - the baseline for accessibility.
How to fix it
Findings from this check are prompts to verify, not confirmed failures. For each player reported:
- Check whether it carries audio-only content with meaningful information. A video with a soundtrack is covered by other checks, and audio that is itself an alternative for text on the page (such as a read-aloud version of an article) passes; the finding.
- For genuine audio-only content, publish a transcript covering everything said, who says it, and any meaningful sounds.
- Place the transcript on the same page as the player, or link to it clearly from there. Transcription services and speech-to-text tools make this inexpensive, but review automatic transcripts for errors.
How Silktide tests this
- Find the audio and video 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 text alternative exists - Silktide cannot listen to the audio or judge whether nearby text is an equivalent.
Troubleshooting
There is a transcript on the page already
Silktide cannot reliably recognise that nearby text is a full equivalent of the audio, so the finding is still shown. Verify the transcript is complete, then approve the finding.