Video Captions
Web accessibility is essential for people with disabilities and useful for all. Learn about the impact of accessibility and the benefits for everyone in a variety of situations.
Video on Video Captions
This video information is available as a Text Transcript with Description of Visuals below.
What is “Video Captions”?
Captions are a text form of audio information in video and animations. This includes the words that are spoken, who is speaking when it is not evident, and important sounds like music, laughter, and noises. Captions must be synchronized with the visual content to contextualize them.
Who depends on this feature?
- People who are deaf and cannot hear the audio.
- People who are hard of hearing and cannot hear some of the content.
- People with cognitive and learning disabilities who need to see and hear the content to better understand it.
What are the additional benefits?
- Content can be used in loud environments where you cannot hear the audio.
- Content can be used in silent environments where you cannot turn on sound.
- Content can be better understood by people hearing and seeing the information, for example, people who are less fluent in the language spoken.
- Content can be read rather than watched, which is easier and quicker for some people.
- Content in text form, such as caption files and transcripts, can be better indexed by search engines.
- Content can be used without needing to download video files, for example, to save data on mobile.
What needs to happen for this to work?
Captions must be made available with pre-recorded and live video content. Voice recognition software can help create captions for some type of videos. Sometimes such voice recognition software is built into the computer or social media platform. Automatically-generated captions often need editing. For many languages there are captioning services, often also remote services.
Learn more
- Accessibility Principle:
- Getting Started:
- Easy Check:
- User Story:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG Overview):
- Mobile Applicability:
Text Transcript with Description of Visuals
| Audio | Visual |
|---|---|
| Web Accessibility Perspectives: Video Captions | Web Accessibility Perspectives: Video Captions |
| Video isn't just about pictures, it's also about sound. Without the audio, you would have to guess what this film is about. | A man sat at a desk starts watching a video on his computer. |
| [no sound] | The video on his computer shows a person speaking to the camera. It is playing with no audio. |
| Frustrating isn't it? Not knowing what's going on. That's the situation for everyone who can't hear. | The man watching the video has a hearing aid. |
| Captions make videos accessible. | He turns on captions for the video playing. |
| Which is also handy for people who want to watch video in loud environments. | Another man is watching the captioned video with a group of people chatting away next to him. |
| Or where you need to be very, very quiet. | Turns out that they are in a library. The group is shushed by the librarian. |
| Web accessibility: Essential for some, useful for all. | The video is shown playing with the captions on. |
| Visit w3.org/WAI/perspectives for more information on Video Captions | Visit w3.org/WAI/perspectives for more information on Video Captions. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative logo |