• 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 class="settings-live-producer-panel">
  <h2>Live Video Settings: Product Launch Broadcast</h2>
  <video src="live://product-launch-feed" autoplay controls>
    <track kind="captions" src="live://product-launch-captions" srclang="en" label="Live captions">
  </video>
</div>
<!-- The page admin monitors this broadcast from the platform's Settings
     > Live Video panel. The captioning vendor's connection drops at the
     12-minute mark; no fallback or error message appears for the
     remaining 20 minutes -->

Why it matters

A deaf marketing lead monitoring her company's live product launch from the platform's Live Video settings panel loses the caption feed right as the biggest feature announcement happens, with no warning that anything went wrong.

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

Live events need a monitored fallback captioner and a visible status message for the rare moments the primary service drops.

<div class="settings-live-producer-panel">
  <h2>Live Video Settings: Product Launch Broadcast</h2>
  <video src="live://product-launch-feed" autoplay controls>
    <track kind="captions" src="live://product-launch-captions" srclang="en" label="Live captions">
  </video>
  <p class="caption-status" role="status" hidden>
    Live captions have paused; reconnecting now.
  </p>
</div>
<!-- A backup captioning provider fails over automatically if the
     primary connection drops during the event -->

Outcome

She sees the reconnect notice in the settings panel, waits a few seconds, and confirms the backup captioner is covering the rest of the announcement for her audience.

Who is affected

Deaf and hard-of-hearing page admins and creators monitoring their own broadcasts from Live Video settings lose access mid-event with no indication of the outage or any alternative to follow along.

Learn more

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