Web Accessibility Perspectives: Video Captions

Introduction

Web accessibility is essential for people with disabilities and useful for all. Learn about the impact of accessibility and the benefits for everyone in a variety of situations.

Video on Video Captions

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What is "Video Captions"?

Captions are a text form of audio information in video and animations. This includes the words that are spoken, who is speaking when it is not evident, and important sounds like music, laughter, and noises. Captions must be synchronized with the visual content to contextualize them.

Who depends on this feature?

People who are deaf and cannot hear the audio.
People who are hard of hearing and cannot hear some of the content.
People with cognitive and learning disabilities who need to see and hear the content to better understand it.

What are the additional benefits?

Content can be used in loud environments where you cannot hear the audio.
Content can be used in silent environments where you cannot turn on sound.
Content can be better understood by people hearing and seeing the information, for example people who are less fluent in the language spoken.
Content can be read rather than watched, which is easier and quick for some people for some types of videos.
Content in text form, such as caption files and transcripts, can be better indexed by search engines.
Content can be used without needing to download video files, for example to save data on mobile.

What needs to happen for this to work?

Captions must be made available with pre-recorded and live video content. Voice recognition software can help create captions for some type of videos. Sometimes such voice recognition software is built into the computer or social media platform. Automatically-generated captions often need editing. For many languages there are captioning services, often also remote services.