Accessibility
When most of us think of captioning of movies, TV, and online video content, we have often associated it with the hearing impaired community. However, captioning stretches beyond the 1.5 billion people, or 20% global population, who suffer from hearing loss.
Those with autism can also suffer hearing issues, such as auditory clutter, hyper-sensitivity, and environmental deafness, to name a few. People with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) or tinnitus also struggle to hear clearly.
How do I know? Because I have autism and high-pitched sounds are a problem for me.
I recently watched a LinkedIn Learning video using captioning because the presenter’s voice was causing me sensory issues and I was unable to focus on what was being said. If captions had not been available, I would have had to look elsewhere for the information.
We are now all very familiar with captions in online video content, with most companies using speech recognition to produce the captions. This means that more content than ever before automatically comes with a certain level of accessibility.
However, this in isolation is not a perfect solution. Speech recognition still has its own technical limitations, so auto-generated captions can vary from being somewhat to completely inaccurate, which can cause users to give up or look elsewhere.
Captions are also not limited to pre-recorded videos – they also extend to live content. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) states that captioning falls into two standards levels:
With more people working remotely, this means the hearing impaired are relying on audio and video calls to get work done. Fortunately, many tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom provide live captioning to assist with this.
Although this function has its own limitations that can sometimes lead to inaccurate captions, a bigger issue is that many hosts or presenters fail to use this feature at all. For some it may be corporate security strategies blocking access to the feature, but for others it is just a simple case of the feature not being turned on ahead of the presentation.
As mentioned above, many people often thought that captions are only intended for, and beneficial to, people hard of hearing. Now, with the increase of online-based education and business meetings following the COVID-19 pandemic, this attitude has finally started to change.
Even those of us with good hearing are now appreciating captions more as a means of improving comprehension, attention, and memory of a video. This means we also miss out on these benefits because not all videos are captioned.
Auto-generated captions are helping to bridge this gap, but they are not without error. Until auto-generated captions reach the point where they are indistinguishable from human-transcribed ones, it is up to us to step up and manually create the captions so they can be enjoyed and appreciated by all.
Principal Consultant
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