A short guide to captions and transcripts

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Everything we would tell a client about captions and transcripts in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Why this earns attention

Captions help far more people than those who need them. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Where to start

Transcripts are also indexable content. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The mistakes we see most

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

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

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