Video carries four separate duties and most sites meet one of them. Captions serve people who cannot hear the audio; a transcript serves people who would rather read and everybody using search; audio description serves people who cannot see what is happening; and the player itself has to be operable by keyboard, which is the one nobody checks. This page is the four, what each costs, and the order to do them in. On the worked example four uncaptioned videos are eight issues of 401, and the player is a template issue that affects every page it appears on.
Captions, and why automatic ones are not enough
WCAG asks for captions on prerecorded audio content. Automatic captions are a starting draft: they mis-hear names, product terms and numbers, which are exactly the words a viewer needed. Correcting a machine transcript takes roughly the runtime of the video again, which is a real but small cost and the one worth paying first.
Transcripts, which are cheap and do the most work
A transcript is the caption file as text on the page. It costs almost nothing once the captions exist, it is readable by everybody, it makes the content searchable, and it is the accessible fallback when the player fails. If you only do one thing for video, do captions and publish the transcript beneath them.
Audio description and the player itself
Audio description covers what is shown but not said, and matters for demonstrations and anything with on-screen text. It is the most expensive of the four, so scope it to the videos that genuinely need it. Then test the player by keyboard: play, pause, volume, captions toggle and fullscreen all reachable, with visible focus. A player that fails that is a video nobody can start.
Questions people ask about ada compliant video
Do we need audio description on every video?
No. On videos where meaning is carried visually. A talking head with slides usually needs the slides described in the transcript instead.
Are automatic captions ever acceptable?
As a draft. Publish them corrected; the errors are always in the words that matter.
What about live video?
Live captions are a separate, harder criterion. Most businesses meet it by publishing a captioned recording afterwards.