Three myths about captions and transcripts

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A few things about captions and transcripts that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

“It only matters for big sites”

Captions help far more people than those who need them. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• 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

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