What to ask your agency about captions and transcripts
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on captions and transcripts, these questions are worth asking early.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Captions help far more people than those who need them. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Auto-generated captions need a human pass. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
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
- Transcripts are also indexable content — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.