Captions available (live)
Group: images-and-media • Guideline: captions
Summary in Plain English
Everything spoken in live audio is captioned as it happens, for the whole of the content rather than parts of it.
Why It Matters
Live is where there is no catching up afterwards. Without captions, a deaf or hard-of-hearing participant is excluded from the event as it happens.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Quoted from the provision's informative document, informative/guidelines/images-and-media/captions/captions-available-live.md. It is the group's own procedure, not an editorial testing guide.
Procedure
For all live audio content:
- Check that captions are provided.
Expected results
- #1 is true.
W3C Working Group Status
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
3 GitHub threads carrying 7 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
⚠️ This summary is stale — comments landed after it was written.
What the Argument Is About
Three unconnected asks sit under this provision — fix WCAG 2's odd audio-only/audio+video split, tier caption quality alongside sign language, and merge the live caption requirements — and only the sign language one drew any reply.
Positions taken in the thread
Live audio+video requires captions at AA (SC 1.2.4) while live audio-only sits at AAA (SC 1.2.9), a split made when internet-radio-style audio streams were common and live video was technically onerous. Twitch, let's plays and live webinars have reversed that, and captioning either is equally hard. Taken to its conclusion, an author doing a live audio-only vlog is off the hook, but turning the camera on to show their face makes them fail. Raised in #189 in 2019 and carried forward with no reply on the substance.
Auto-generated subtitles may be inaccurate and fail to carry tone and nuance, so captions alone do not deliver equitable access for Deaf people whose first language is signed (#325). Proposes graduated conformance: auto-generated or basic captions at Bronze, accurate descriptive captions plus context-appropriate sign language at Silver, and culturally appropriate sign language with multilingual caption options at Gold. Wants minimum quality guidance covering accuracy, speaker identification, emotional tone and cultural context.
Notes that Gold is likely achievable without doing everything listed at that level, and that the working group has not finalised what Bronze, Silver or Gold mean. Nothing definitive can be said about which tier anything lands in yet. Unrebutted, and the tiering discussion continued regardless.
Points to "Captions are available for all live audio content" and suggests that it can absorb some other requirements about captions for live video, merging them (#461). Filed as a short review note in December 2025 with no responses.
Agreed
- InfoGapBuster's point that auto-generated captions can be inaccurate and miss tone and nuance was not disputed in #325, though no other participant addressed caption quality directly.
- GreggVan's point that the conformance levels are unfinalised went unchallenged.
Still open
- Whether WCAG 3 keeps WCAG 2's distinction between live audio-only and live audio+video content at all — patrickhlauke's #189 is still open and unanswered after seven years.
- Whether caption quality (accuracy, speaker identification, tone) becomes normative or stays as guidance — InfoGapBuster's proposal 5 in #325.
- Whether the live captions requirement absorbs the separate live-video caption requirements, as MakotoUeki proposes in #461.
- md84419 argues in #325 that the discussion is really about text alternatives and belongs in a new section under Text and Wording rather than Image and Media Alternatives, which would move it out of this provision's scope entirely.
Note
Low volume and largely one-directional: #189 and #461 have no comments at all, and the only threaded exchange (#325) is a multi-provision sign language proposal that touches captions mainly as the thing sign language is being contrasted against.
- #189 Revisiting imbalance between 1.2.4 Captions (Live) (AA) and 1.2.9 Audio-only (Live) (AAA) open 0 comments · updated 2026-05-02
- #325 Clarifying and Enhancing Requirements for Sign Language and Subtitles in WCAG 3.0 closed 7 comments · updated 2026-10-12
- #461 Can merge some other requirements? - Captions live (Foundational) open 0 comments · updated 2026-03-29
WCAG 2.2 Criteria That Map Here
From this site's reviewed WCAG 2.2 → WCAG 3 map. The map is an interpretation, not a W3C mapping: W3C has not published one yet.
W3C Raw Source Text
Verbatim from guidelines/groups/images-and-media/captions/captions-available-live.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/images-and-media/captions/captions-available-live.md
Captions are available for all live audio content.