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Why Caption Online Video?

There are both “business case” and legal reasons to caption online video.

Key “business case” reasons to captioning online – or web – video include:

Sample captioned television broadcast in an airport.

Increasing your audience: captioning makes your video accessible to as many as 60 million additional users, including people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people for whom English is not their primary language, teachers helping their students learn to read, and older people with diminished hearing skills.
Improving usability: captioning ensures effective content delivery in many situations, such as:
- When users are in noisy environments (such as airport concourses)
- When users are in a quiet environment where the audio would disturb others
- When the computer speakers are poor or distorted
- When users are multitasking at home or in the office
- When learners remember what they hear and read more effectively than what they just hear
Improving searchability: when done right, captions make the video content more visible to search engines. In techspeak, while search engines index videos, the content is not normally indexed. Captions add to the video’s metadata, making it indexible, thereby improving its chances for a higher ranking by search engines.