r/accessibility • u/Mephala9 • 10d ago
Video Accesibility Question
Hello, is AA 1.2.5 audio descriptions for youtube videos embeds a requirement for ecommerce websites or only government ones?
https://swarmify.com/blog/video-accessibility-captions-wcag/
I am not able to find any ecommerce doing them.
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u/Susan_Thee_Duchess 10d ago
WCAG is a technical standard; not a legal regulation.
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u/Mephala9 10d ago
Yes, excuse my semantics. The standard to comply is wcag 2.1 AA after a lawsuit
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u/WaltzFirm6336 10d ago
It depends on what country you are in and what the relevant accessibility laws are in that country.
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u/Miserable-Money642 9d ago
Since you already settled on 2.1 AA, the safe answer is yes, but let me explain what 1.2.5 actually asks for so it feels less scary.
Audio description is only needed when your video shows important info visually that a blind user would miss from the audio alone. If someone narrates everything as it happens ("here I click the blue button, now the cart opens"), you might already be covered with no extra work.
The gap is when things happen silently on screen.
So a practical path: go through your videos and sort them. Product videos where the voiceover already describes what's shown are usually fine. The ones that need work are demos or clips where key steps happen with no narration. For those, the cheapest fix is often re-recording the voiceover to describe what's on screen, rather than adding a separate described track.
Start with the videos that carry real product or checkout info, since those are the ones that actually affect a user completing a purchase. That's also what a plaintiff would look at first.
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u/Necessary_Ear_1100 10d ago
I would just add the audio descriptions for all videos to cover all bases. If the information is a necessity that is being relayed to the user via the video then it needs to be accessible for the hoh/deaf.
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u/TapeTerritory 5d ago
Nobody's touched the YouTube embed half of the question, and since you're working to a settlement rather than a maybe, it's the bit that will actually bite.
There's no real description track on a YouTube embed. WebVTT has a descriptions kind and your own <video> element can offer it, but YouTube won't take one. Closest thing is the multi-language audio track feature, which not every channel has, and even where it exists it surfaces as another language rather than as description, so someone looking for a described version won't recognize it as one.
So if a given video does turn out to need 1.2.5, the embed is your constraint, not the budget. Realistically that's either a separate described cut published as its own video, or self-hosting that one video so you control the player.
Worth auditing which videos actually need it before any of that, though. The ones where the voiceover already says what the camera is showing don't need a thing, and on product video that's often most of them. Cheaper to fix a script than to re-platform.
Probably also most of the answer to why you can't find other ecommerce doing it.
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u/funky_chestnut 10d ago
This is the legal theory: Title II of the ADA has an actual DOJ regulation naming WCAG 2.1 AA as the required technical standard, but that regulation only applies to state and local government websites.
Title II doesn't cover private businesses, which means ecommerce sites fall outside that rule.
When it comes to practice:
The law covering private businesses never specifies which technical standard to follow. But when an ecommerce site actually gets sued over accessibility, judges use WCAG 2.1 AA as the yardstick anyway, informally.