To Caption or not to Caption

woman eating watching movieAs soon as your content includes videos you should be thinking about captioning. In the simplest form, captioning is those words on the screen that are readable as the audio portion of the program is spoken. The idea is that captioning is only useful for deaf or people who are hard of hearing. Not true. An oft quoted survey from the UK done in 2006 revealed that 80% of TV viewers who used closed captioning did not have hearing difficulties. Times have changed, technology has advanced, yet many people without any hearing loss use captioning as a way to enhance/ enjoy videos. They listen in a public area and don’t want to disturb others, on a noisy subway and they situationally can’t hear the sound or they get more out of the content if they can watch and read the words at the same time (dual sensory input).

The law: The US Congress passed a Twenty-First Century Communications and Accessibility Act in 2010, with a string of updates and clarifications through 2015. Two broad areas are covered. One is products and services that use Broadband. The other is video programming on television and the internet.

In February, 2015, National Association for the Deaf (NAD) and some individuals sued Harvard and MIT over lack of captioning or very poor captioning of the video content they provide, covering online lectures, podcasts, courses and more. In June, 2015, the Department of Justice (DOJ) joined the lawsuit advocating a speedy resolution and captioning be provided.

Netflix has lead the way to providing full captioning, even though it was, regretfully, a result of a successful lawsuit. YouTube provides an automated captioning option. The results, while technically over 90% accurate lead to, often hilarious (if you are able to hear the discrepancies) wildly incongruous word juxtapositions. If you doubt me, just switch on captioning when you are on YouTube next and find your own examples. Any time a person mumbles or has the slightest speech anomaly or accent there is no telling how the automated captioning will record it.

So, to caption or not to caption? When in doubt, decent captioning should be built into your process, including everyone and building your brand as inclusive.

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