How to get captions and transcripts right
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. The short answer to captions and transcripts is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
What it costs to ignore
Captions help far more people than those who need them. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Transcripts are also indexable content
- Auto-generated captions need a human pass
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Auto-generated captions need a human pass. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
Making it stick
How to tell if yours is fine
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
- 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
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.