Success Criterion 1.2.4
Conformance level AA

Live Captions That Cut Out Partway Through the Event

1.2.4 — Captions (Live)

Scenario

Setting

A social media platform's settings menu

What’s wrong

Captions dropped mid-event (caption service fails, no fallback) for substantive portions.

Example

<div id="live-stream"><!-- live video, no caption feed --></div>

Why it matters

Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes, and meetings.

How to test

Watch a full live session start to finish: any stretch of missing/dropped captions during substantive content is a fail.

How to fix

Readable, reasonably accurate real-time captions must run for the entire live event.

<div id="live-stream"><!-- live video --></div>

<div id="live-captions" aria-live="polite"></div>

Real-time captions, from a human captioner or a checked automated feed, must ship with the live audio, not after it.

Outcome

On a social media platform's settings menu, this barrier is gone for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes — they can finish what they came here to do.

Who is affected