• Success Criterion 1.2.5
  • Conformance level AA

Talking-Head Video Wrongly Assumed to Need No Description

1.2.5 — Audio Description (Prerecorded)

Scenario

Setting

A ride-hailing app's trip booking screen

What’s wrong

Claiming "no audio description needed" for videos that do contain meaningful visual info (talking-head exemption misapplied when slides/demos appear).

Example

<video src="tutorial.mp4"></video>

Why it matters

Blind and low-vision viewers who need spoken descriptions of important visuals.

How to test

Watch the video and judge whether it has meaningful visual-only content (slides, demos, actions): if so and no AD/transcript exists because the team assumed none was needed, it fails.

How to fix

An audio description track must describe all important visual-only content, using available pauses in dialogue.

<video src="tutorial.mp4">
  <track kind="descriptions" src="ad-en.vtt" srclang="en">
</video>

Audio description narrates visual actions and on-screen content during the video's existing pauses.

Outcome

On a ride-hailing app's trip booking screen, this barrier is gone for blind and low-vision viewers who need spoken descriptions of important visuals — they no longer have to work around this.

Who is affected

Blind and low-vision viewers who need spoken descriptions of important visuals.

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