Captions and transcripts: a practical guide

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. This guide covers what captions and transcripts actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What it costs to ignore

Captions help far more people than those who need them. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

Where to start

Transcripts are also indexable content. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Captions help far more people than those who need them
• Transcripts are also indexable content
• Auto-generated captions need a human pass
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Common failure modes

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Turning this into a decision

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.