Captions for live audio
Silktide finds the audio and video players on your pages so you can confirm that any live broadcasts provide real-time captions. Whether a stream is live, and whether captions run during it, cannot be determined automatically.
Why this matters
A live webinar, stream, or broadcast without excludes people who are deaf or hard of hearing at the moment it matters most - they cannot pause and wait for a transcript the way they could with a recording. Live captions carry the dialogue, identify speakers, and note meaningful sounds as they happen.
This requirement comes from success criterion 1.2.4, which applies at .
How to fix it
Findings from this check are prompts to verify, not confirmed failures. For each player reported:
- Check whether it ever carries live content. Prerecorded media is covered by Captions for prerecorded audio / video instead, and passes this check; the finding.
- For genuine live content, arrange real-time captioning: professional captioners produce the best results, and most streaming platforms also offer automatic live captions, which vary in quality.
- Confirm the captions are actually enabled and visible in the player your visitors use during broadcasts.
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
caption 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 live captions are provided where relevant - Silktide cannot tell live from prerecorded content or see captions rendered inside a player.
Troubleshooting
Nothing on my site is live
Then nothing fails this criterion - review the reported players once, confirm they only carry prerecorded media, and approve the findings.