"Description" terminology

shawna-slh commented 3 years ago

The Description page uses just “Description” in the navigation and most places throughout the page.

It starts out with:

Description of visual information is called audio description, video description, or described video in different areas.

Considerations:

Informal user research previously highlighted that “audio description” is totally misunderstood by many. Whereas “video description” is understood.
Description does not need to be audio; it can be provided as text in some cases.
WCAG uses “audio description” and a lot of people are familiar with that term. (even though it is confusing to many people not in-the-know)

Proposal: Edit this page and throughout the resource to further limit “audio description”. Instead use:

description of visual information

and on first reference in a page or where useful :

description of visual information, which is also known as audio description, video description, or described video

and on pages where it is used a lot, just:

description

shawna-slh commented 3 years ago

Old info: Background, perspectives, and informal research in Issue from 2019

New info: Synchronization Accessibility User Requirements First Public Working Draft uses "descriptions" and "video description":

... such as captions, sign language interpretation, and descriptions
Video Description Synchronization
... include a video track, an audio track, captions, video descriptions, and sign language interpretation of the audio track
Video description (sometimes referred to as “audio description”)

See the terminology and the NOTE under Video Description Synchronization, e.g.:

Video description can be delivered by two alternative means:
- As an audio track synchronized with the visual track, or
- as text for presentation to the user via a text to speech system or a braille device. ... This is referred to in [MAUR] as "video text description".

shawna-slh commented 3 years ago

shawna-slh commented 2 years ago

w3c / wai-media-guide