Yes. WCAG (the W3C guidelines referenced as the gold standard for web accessibility) require both captions for people who are deaf and audio descriptions (an audio track with a person describing anything important that is happening in the video) for people who are blind.

It’s a challenging requirement because both can be difficult/expensive to implement, especially for smaller organizations.

Technology is catching up to make this easier, with automatic captioning AIs and better software for creating transcriptions. On the audio description side of things we’re seeing improved browser support for TTS description tracks on HTML video, so you don’t have to hire a narrator.

It applies to certain videos regardless of platform (clips from TV which aired on cable or broadcast and certain other videos being the most common example). So if NBC uploads a clip to Youtube, they must caption it. Netflix Originals don't have to. Auto-captioning doesn't count because the quality is not consistent enough (although that is starting to change).

In the cast of Teachers Test Prep, it was training videos that someone had to watch as a condition of employment. So it was an employment law issue - they could have complied by offering one-on-one accessible tutoring instead of captions.

Mom-and-pop Youtube influencers do not legally have to caption anything.

Those distinctions aren't clear from the linked article. Do you have a source that Netflix doesn't have to caption their video productions but NBC does?

Teacher's Prep sounds like an online-only course program. Why couldn't they pull this alleged online-only Netflix loophole?

The requirement the GP was referring to comes from the combination of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) rather than the ADA. The Telecommunications Act requires "video programming distributors" to provide closed captioning for most televised video programming (televised being the operative word here). The CVAA extended the requirement so that it also applies to televised video programming distributed on the internet. But according to the FCC's consumer guide on the CVAA, it "does not cover programs shown only on the Internet"[1].

The CVAA doesn't apply to Teachers Test Prep any more than it does to Netflix. But Title III of the ADA includes a section on "Examinations and courses" that states "Any private entity that offers examinations or courses related to applications, licensing, certification, or credentialing for secondary or postsecondary education, professional, or trade purposes shall offer such examinations or courses in a place and manner accessible to persons with disabilities or offer alternative accessible arrangements for such individuals"[2]. That's what the Justice Department found them to be in violation of. The fundamental problem was that their courses were inaccessible; lack of captioning (or other "alternative accessible arrangements") was what caused them to be in violation but wasn't a violation in and of itself.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/21st-century-communicat...

[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-28/chapter-I/part-36/subp...

Thank you for writing this up! Very good summary of the relevant laws and regs.

Youtube already supplies at a minimum auto-generated subtitles, which are imperfect, but usually serviceable.

YouTube's autogenerated captions are highly variable in quality. They are sometimes serviceable for carefully produced videos of English speakers with a neutral accent, and degrade rapidly as videos move away from this ideal.

It also appears to be trained on news broadcasts (not surprising) since it will often interpret unclear phrases by injecting oddly political content, often with much hilarity.