Your video content needs captions: open or closed?
Where would we be without video?
In these past 12 months, video has become a necessity.
It has offered us a lifeline, allowing us to remain connected with our loved ones, careers, hobbies, curiosities, and the wider world.
Video has been equally essential for our schools, colleges, and universities. It has allowed us to stream the education experience to our students, colleagues, stakeholders.
Lectures, graduation ceremonies, open day tours… all have been committed to video and broadcast to our audiences.
Video has helped people access our teaching, events, and campuses from afar.
But to be truly accessible, our videos need captions.
Why do our videos need captions?
Captions greatly increase the accessibility of our video content.
They benefit:
Deaf people
People with disabling hearing loss
People without ear buds in a public place
People with the sound turned off on their phone
People who enjoy video content more with captions.
Good captions capture dialogue and ambient sounds, such as:
Cheering at a varsity match
Laughter between classmates
Trumpets at a degree ceremony
Clinking glasses at an alumni reunion
Chimes from the campus clock tower
Engines revving in the engineering faculty
The gavel hammering in the student moot room
And countless others.
Describing these sounds will better communicate what is happening in the video.
But which type of captions are most accessible?
Open captions and closed captions
There are two types of captions: open captions and closed captions.
Open captions are burned onto the video. They are out in the open, ever present, fixed. There is no option to:
Turn them off
Adjust their size
Change their font
Change their language.
However, closed captions are not fixed.
They can be toggled on and off, usually with a little cc button that appears on screen.
Which captions are more accessible?
Closed captions are more accessible for several reasons.
Closed captions:
Offer audiences a choice. If you struggle with dyslexia, or a learning disability, then you might prefer to access a video without captions, because fast-changing words on the screen will add to your cognitive load.
Can be resized and reformatted, allowing people with visual impairments to choose a size and font that they find easier to read.
Are crawled by search bots, improving your SEO rankings, so your content is easier for all people to discover and access.
Are automatically translated into different languages on some platforms. This helps users who speak a language other than English as their primary language.
How can you add closed captions?
There are numerous services, such as Happy Scribe, that allow you to create captions for your video content.
These captions can be downloaded as their own standalone .srt file. This allows you to upload the captions and their accompanying video footage as two separate elements.
This allows audiences to:
View the video with captions
View the video without captions
Manipulate the .srt file so they can view the captions in different sizes, fonts, languages.
With closed captions, our audiences are given a choice when they view video content on our websites.
And choice is great for accessibility.
Captions on social media
Captions are important for social media video content too.
Closed captions can be auto-populated or added as an .srt file on:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
LinkedIn.
Manually adding an .srt file is preferable. Whilst auto-population is improving, it still leaves room for error. That is why auto-populated captions are known as ‘craptions’ by many deaf people.
However, on Instagram and IGTV, closed captions can only be auto-populated. There is currently no option to add captions manually. This auto-population is a new feature, so at least the platform is heading in a positive direction.
Meanwhile, on Instagram Stories and TikTok, closed captions are entirely unavailable. The most accessible option is to provide open captions by manually adding text to your videos.
Improve your accessibility
Pickle Jar Communications would love to partner with you to improve your web and social media accessibility.
There are a variety of services that we can provide:
Delivering accessibility training for your staff
Conducting an accessibility audit of your website and channels
Providing recommendations to help you address accessibility issues
Writing an accessibility strategy for your institution
Creating accessible content for your channels: copy, images, audio, video.
If you want to commit to creating an online presence which supports accessibility, then we would love to explore this with you. Please do get in touch.
Until then, remember to offer closed captions for your video content.
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