Captions and transcripts for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about captions and transcripts assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What to keep

Captions help far more people than those who need them. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

The practical version

Auto-generated captions need a human pass. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.