Level A · WCAG 2.0
1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded)
Pre-recorded video with sound needs captions covering speech and the sounds that matter to understanding.
Partly automated Some failures are detectable, others need judgement.
How it fails in practice
A product demo on the homepage with auto-generated captions that are switched off by default — or none at all. Captions that transcribe speech but skip the alert sound the narrator refers to.
How to fix it
Ship real captions, reviewed by a person. Auto-captions are a starting draft: names, product terms and numbers are exactly what they get wrong, and those are the words that carry the meaning.
At a glance
- Level
- Level A — the minimum. Failing one of these usually makes something impossible rather than merely hard.
- Principle
- Perceivable
- Guideline
- 1.2 Time-based Media
- Added in
- WCAG 2.0
- EN 301 549
- 9.1.2.2
- Automated check
- Partly automated
Partly automated
How far an automated check gets
A tool finds some failures here and cannot see the rest. A clean automated result means the checks that exist found nothing — not that the criterion is met. This is the gap that makes a green scan look like an accessible site, and it is where the keyboard agent, the agents still in development and a human reviewer do the remaining work.
Rules that check this criterion
video-caption<video> elements must have captions
The rule ids are axe-core’s (version 4.14.0), the open-source engine our scan runs, and our keyboard agent’s — the names a report or a CI log will show. An underlined id has a page of its own here.
Related criteria
Other criteria under the same guideline.
Further reading
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Captions
Synchronised text for speech and meaningful sound in video; required for prerecorded (WCAG 1.2.2, A) and live content (1.2.4, AA).
Find out which criteria your site fails
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