Screenshot of a YouTube video titled “What is a Chief Fractional Web Officer? | Web Pro Geeks” showing a paused frame with a blue background. In the center, a cartoon figure holds their head in frustration, surrounded by icons representing email, chat, mobile, and desktop. On the right, the YouTube transcript panel is open, highlighting text from 0:14 to 0:46. The words “Transcripts” and “Captions” are labeled with bold black text on yellow boxes and arrows pointing to each feature. The Web Pro Geeks channel logo appears at the bottom left.

Creating Accessible Captions and Transcripts for Video

One element of web accessibility you may not give much thought to are accessible captions and transcripts.

Why are Captions and Transcripts Important?

Over 5% of the world’s population – that’s 430 million people –  have disabling hearing loss. They therefore rely on captions for video content. Captions are beneficial for people in noisy environments who can’t listen. They are helpful when sound is distorted or muffled, or for videos when people speak quickly, quietly or in an accent hard to understand. People learning the language also benefit from captions.

These days it’s popular for people to play videos on social media without sound. This accounts for 85% of videos on Facebook, 80% on LinkedIn and 40% on Instagram. There’s also evidence that people are 80% more likely to watch an entire video if it includes captions.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines mention captions and transcripts – so it’s important to familiarize yourself with their instructions and advice.

What Exactly are Video Captions?

Captions are the text version of a video’s audio that appears in sync with the video as it plays. Captions don’t just include dialogue – they identify the speaker and include description of any sounds of significance. And if your video has no sound or only has background music, you don’t need to caption it. 

There are two types of captions, open and closed. Open captions are burned into the video and can’t be switched off. Closed captions can be turned on and off with a setting. Closed captions can also be in multiple languages for the one video, and their appearance can sometimes be customized. For example, YouTube lets you change the caption font, color and size. Open captions are better for social media and branded content while closed captions are better for educational or multilingual videos.

There are a number of caption formats. The most commonly used are SRT (which stands for SubRip Subtitle) and VTT (Web Video Text Tracks). The main difference between the two is that VTT files are much more feature-rich, supporting text formatting and screen positioning.

Now, What’s the Difference Between Captions and Transcripts? 

Captions are an on-screen record of dialogue and sounds in a video. Caption files are time-coded to match the action on screen. 

Transcripts are a text record of the content of a video or audio recording which is usually displayed below the content. Sometimes the transcript is interactive: words in the transcript are highlighted to match the words spoken on screen. Full verbatim transcripts include filler words like um and ah, hesitations, repetitions, stutters and slang words. Clean verbatim transcripts remove or rephrase these to make the end product more polished.

Video services like YouTube offer auto-captioning. Which sounds great – but they are very often inaccurate. Bad auto-captions have been nicknamed “craptions”. They may be unsynchronized to the content, fail to distinguish between speakers, misspell words, add incorrect words, and get names wrong. According to the University of Minnesota Duluth, YouTube’s auto-captions are 60-70% accurate, which means that 1 in 3 words can be wrong. Auto-captions can be a starting point for captioned videos. THey can help you get the majority of the text collected, but they should not be the end point. Always proofread and edit captions if you’re going to use auto-generated ones. 

So How Can You Ensure That Your Captions are Good? 

Accessibility consultant Meryl Evans has 10 guidelines:

  1. If you’re creating open captions, make them readable. No fancy fonts or colors. Don’t use all capitals, either. 
  2. Accuracy. Don’t rely on auto-captions, check and correct them. Keep all the words, including profanity. 
  3. The captions should be synchronized with the visuals. 
  4. Length. A line of captions should not be too short or too long. Show only one or two lines of captions at a time. Avoid splitting sentences where it would make them harder to follow. 
  5. Position. Placing captions at the bottom of the screen is best.
  6. Sound. Caption significant sounds. The convention is to put them into square brackets. If there’s a period of silence, mention that. If a song plays with lyrics, make sure that it’s captioned too. 
  7. Credits. Make sure that if you have credits and captions shown together that they don’t overlap.
  8. Voice. If someone whispers, shouts, puts on an accent or speaks sarcastically, include this in your captions. 
  9. Speaker identification. If it’s not clear who’s speaking, name them. If two people speak, you can indicate this by using dashes before each line of captions. 
  10. Motion. Prefer pop-in captions to scrolling captions. If you use scrolling captions, for example, in a live program, make sure that they scroll from left to right and top to bottom, and try to keep up with the audio.

How Do You Create Captions?

Don’t worry – you don’t have to type out all your video captions word for word yourself. There are many captioning services available online. Some of the best known are Rev, GoTranscript and 3Play Media. All of them sell AI and human-created captioning and transcription services.

For free captions, you can access YouTube’s auto-captions for a previously uploaded video by going to YouTube Studio. Select the video and choose Subtitles from the left hand menu. Hover over the “Subtitles” column and choose “Duplicate” and edit (the pencil icon). You can play back your video and edit the captions as required. You can also edit the timings for them.

CapCut is a video editing tool which is popular with content creators. It used to offer free auto-captions, but now allows 2 uses per month for free. You can export the captions as a .srt file, or a text transcript as a .txt file.

When you’re ready to generate and upload your captions, follow our step by step guide.

Whatever app or service you use, you will need to check and correct the captions if necessary, render the video with captions if you want to use open captions, and download the captions and transcript files. Your audience will appreciate you taking the time to make your videos as enjoyable and digestible as possible!