Five mistakes teams make with captions and transcripts

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit captions and transcripts.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Captions help far more people than those who need them
• Transcripts are also indexable content
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Making it stick

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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.