A practical checklist for captions and transcripts
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Run through this the next time captions and transcripts comes up.
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
The checklist
- 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
- There is a date to review it again
The reason this keeps coming up
Captions help far more people than those who need them. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
In practice
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about captions and transcripts before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Captions help far more people than those who need them — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.