Text alternative for pre-recorded video

Silktide finds the audio and video players on your pages so you can confirm that pre-recorded video without sound, such as silent demonstrations and animations, provides its information another way. Whether an equivalent exists is something only a person can verify.

Why this matters

A silent video - an animated product demo, a looping how-to clip, an infographic animation - communicates entirely through vision. People who are blind or have low vision get nothing from it unless the same information is provided as a -style text description or an equivalent audio track providing narration.

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 video-only content with meaningful information. Video with a soundtrack is covered by other checks, purely decorative motion needs no alternative, and a video that is itself an alternative for text on the page passes; the finding.
For genuine video-only content, provide either a text description of what happens in the video, in sequence, or an audio track providing narration.
Place the alternative on the same page as the video, or link to it clearly from there.

How Silktide tests this

Find the video and audio players in each page's HTML, skipping any elements you have excluded from checks.
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 an alternative exists - Silktide cannot watch the video or tell whether it carries a soundtrack.

Troubleshooting

The video is marked as muted, so why must I check it?

The opposite: media with a muted attribute is skipped by this check, because Silktide treats it as not conveying audio information. A deliberately silent video usually has no muted attribute at all - it simply has no soundtrack - so it is reported for review like any other video.