Captions and transcripts: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about captions and transcripts this quarter, make it the first item below.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Start here

Captions help far more people than those who need them. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Then this

Transcripts are also indexable content. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Eventually

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. 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.