Why captioning videos is beneficial in more than one way
By Anne-Mieke Bovelett on April 18, 2022
Status: Up to date
Closed captions are a no-brainer!
- The number of people watching your videos with sound off is much larger than you assume! In fact, 80% of all video viewers are not deaf or hard of hearing.
- Auto-generated captions suck. In our world, we call them auto-craptions. Even if they have the words right, they lack punctuation. That’s a lousy user experience.
- Closed captions are indexed by Google. It’s one of the most overlooked SEO opportunities on the web.
Adding closed captions to YouTube videos is a piece of cake these days, and it’s free!
You do not need to pay for an additional tool, if you really don’t want to.
I’m not saying it’s a quick job. The longer your video, the more time you need. But in YouTube Studio, you can actually edit the auto-generated captions, and save them as closed captions.
Audio transcript
From that file I am talking about, you can also create an audio transcript which you can add to your page when you embed the video on your site.
See? An absolute no-brainer.
FAQ about Captioning videos
Reinventing the wheel is inefficient, and praise should go to where praise belongs: Meryl Evans is in my top 10 of most communicative, passionate accessibility advocates. She wrote this FAQ on captioning videos.