Success Criterion 1.2.4
Conformance level AA

Live Auto-Captions Too Inaccurate for Technical Content

1.2.4 — Captions (Live)

Scenario

Setting

A recipe site's ingredient list

What’s wrong

Live auto-generated (speech recognition) captions with accuracy too low for comprehension in the domain (names, technical terms) and no correction.

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

Compare live auto-generated captions to a 30-second sample of speech: heavy errors in names/technical terms with no correction mean it fails.

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 recipe site's ingredient list, this barrier is gone for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes — they reach the same outcome without extra effort.

Who is affected