“85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. Over half of video content is viewed on mobile. Without captions your video may be lost.”
Captions are the text version of speech and other sounds that can be provided on online videos. They are usually displayed on the bottom of a video screen.
Whilst captions are useful for people who are deaf or hearing impaired or those learning English, they have a rapidly increasing relevance in our busy online worlds. With so much content viewed in public spaces on social media, being able to watch a video without sound is a necessary option.
Australian Government Accessibility Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (or WCAG 2.0), deems it a requirement for government organisations to provide closed captions on website and social media videos. However, for best practice and improved viewer experience we highly recommend all clients consider captioning for all of your videos.
There are two types of captions:
CLOSED CAPTIONS:
These captions are optional and can be turned on or off by the viewer.You may see the ‘CC’ symbol for closed captions.
OPEN CAPTIONS:
These are embedded in video and they automatically appear on a screen. They are always showing on the screen and can’t be turned off by the viewer. There is more creative freedom with open captions such a choice of font and background and text colour.
How can you insert captions into your videos?
• We can do it for you. We will make sure that all of the text is grammatically correct and then send you the video with either closed or open captions.
• We can send you an .srt file which is a very small file with the captions. You can then upload this file to Youtube or Facebook.
To sum up all content – website videos, social media videos, newsletter videos, event videos, training videos and internal communications videos should really be captioned to enable the viewer to watch the content with the sound off.
