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I am trying to make an existing website accessible but I'm struggling with a banner that has a video background streamed from vimeo. I found an identical issue in this SO thread Making a video element with no sound accessible. The poster stated that axe Tools failed the video as it had no captions - the same situation I face.

The accepted answer does not solve that issue though. Setting a parent element to aria-hidden has no impact on axeTools. I need to make the site accessible but also to pass an audit. Does anyone know a way to do this? It seems to me that WCAG is not well thought out here as it seems to have no video equivalent to alt="" or aria-role="presentation" as it does for images when a video is purely decorative and conveys no meaningful information.

castler
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  • axeTools output is not an official audit, so if `aria-hidden` hides the element from the accessibility tree and from screen readers, you have the freedom to ignore this particular point. The important part is the impact for users and for passing WCAG criteria, right? – Andy Jul 27 '22 at 12:35
  • For your comment on the WCAG: It’s the HTML standard which defines how to declare an alternative text, and actually, for ` – Andy Jul 27 '22 at 12:41
  • Thanks Andy, agreed the whole point of making the site accessible is for the benefit of users, but at the same time, and quite reasonably, when a company pays to do that they also want to protect themselves from any potential legal action. . – castler Jul 28 '22 at 13:31
  • I get your point that aria is a different standard but if I recall correctly w3 explicitly states in their documentation that aria presentation is acceptable for decorative images but has no such mention in the docs for video and in fact it explicitly states that video even if there is no audio should have a caption or transcription file provided. I wish your point was correct about hiding it from AT but I don't believe that is stated anywhere in the WCAG guidelines. – castler Jul 28 '22 at 13:33

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Ignore axe or any other automated testing tool for the moment because they often have errors in their reporting. Axe-like tools are not the standard for measuring accessibility. WCAG is. Using a human and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is your sure source to know if you are conformant or not.

In this case, you have two guidelines that apply.

For the first, it says:

Either an alternative for time-based media or an audio track is provided that presents equivalent information for prerecorded video-only content.

So two key points here are:

  1. You can either have an alternative for time-based media (which is often a transcript, and in this case you could have a transcript that describes what is going on in the video) or you can have an audio track that describes the same thing.
  1. You only need this alternative if the video has meaning. The guideline says the alternative must provide "equivalent information". So what's the purpose or meaning of the video? Does it provide information or is it decorative? If the video were removed, would critical information be lost? If it's purely decorative and doesn't provide anything, then the "equivalent information" would essentially be "nothing". The video could be hidden from assistive technology. But you'd want to talk to your designers about the purpose or meaning of the video.

The second guideline, 2.2.2, says if there's moving content (usually an animation but a video counts as moving information), then the user needs a way to stop it. That's normally done with a pause button on the video but it could be done with lots of other ways.

In summary, you need to decide the purpose of the video and whether it conveys information, and if so, decide what an "equivalent" experience would be, and also provide a way to pause the video.

slugolicious
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  • Great answer. I would like to add to the point of it being decorative. That decision often is a great excuse to simply hide something from non-sighted users. But even silent background videos DO contain information. Often, they are propaganda videos with a certain vibe that communicate culture, values, attitude or even value propositions. If we wanted to be inclusive, we would *provide a comparative experience* to non-sighted users and craft an audio-recording that conveys the same message, by means of sounds (music?) and speech. To be tested with concerned users, of course! – Andy Jul 29 '22 at 09:29
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    Exactly, @Andy. "Hero" videos (I think that's what they're called) set the "mood" for the website. If it's important to set the mood for sighted users it should be important for **all** users. – slugolicious Jul 29 '22 at 17:43
  • Thanks folks - I appreciate your time and expertise. I totally agree about hiding things from AT - it does not sit well with me unless it really improves the experience of someone using a screen reader etc rather than trying to brush an issue under the carpet as it were. – castler Jul 31 '22 at 15:47
  • @castler you're ahead of many companies because you're asking questions about accessibility. keep it up – slugolicious Aug 02 '22 at 03:37