Getting started with captions and transcripts
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A short on-ramp to captions and transcripts for teams who have not touched it before.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Why this earns attention
Captions help far more people than those who need them. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Transcripts are also indexable content
- Change one thing and measure it
Auto-generated captions need a human pass. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
The short version
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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.