Captions and transcripts: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about captions and transcripts that come up most often on our calls.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Do we need to care about this?

Captions help far more people than those who need them. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about captions and transcripts before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Auto-generated captions need a human pass — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.