ADA Compliance Language Missing or Invalid for video transcription txt files

Reaching out to see if any ADA compliance experts might know how I might resolve an ADA compliance issue pertaining to our video transactions. We essentially provide links to .txt files for all of our videos which contain the video transcription. But when running an ADA scan we receive 2 errors pertaining to our transcriptions.

"Language missing or invalid " "Missing or uninformative page title"

I'm not sure how I would tell a screen reader or ADA scanner the language or a page title given that these are just plain txt files. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Solution

This might be more about how your browser is set up to handle .txt files. Is your default action to download the file or to view it in the browser?

If the file is downloaded, then it's up to the end user to display the .txt file in whatever program they have set up to view them.

If you're letting the browser display the page, then that page is generated by the browser and I'm not sure if you can customize the page that's generated. I tried Firefox, Chrome, and Edge and they all generated a similar template to view a text file. (Edge uses the chromium engine so it's not surprising that Edge and Chrome have the same template). There's just a minor difference in the <head> between Firefox and Chrome.

This is essentially what's generated:

<html>
  <head>
    <!-- if using firefox -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="resource://content-accessible/plaintext.css">

    <!-- if using chrome/edge -->
    <meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">
  </head>
  <body>
    <pre>
      (contents of text file)
    </pre>
  </body>
</html>

If you run an accessibility scanner on this generated page, you will indeed get the two errors you mentioned.

For the language, that's specified on the <html> element with the lang attribute. If you bring up the code inspector on this stackoverflow page, you'll see lang="en":

<html class="html__responsive " lang="en">

For the page title, that's specified in the <head> with a child element of <title>. You can also see that in the stackoverflow page:

<head>
  <title>wcag - ADA Compliance Language Missing or Invalid for video transcription txt files - Stack Overflow</title>
  ...
</head>

If no page title is specified, the browser usually shows the URL or just the filename as the title.

So, can you do anything about the template? I'm not sure. That would be an interesting project.

An alternative is to have your own webpage display the text file, which you would obviously have complete control over and could specify the language and the page title. But I would make this a lower priority issue over other accessibility issues that your website might have.