Caption every video with words. Most viewers watch without sound by choice, captions are usually a small cost against the production, and automatic ones need correcting rather than trusting.

Who is not hearing it

A larger group than the obvious one, and worth listing because it changes the calculation.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing, which becomes more common with age and covers a substantial share of an older customer base.

Anybody watching in public without headphones, which is most people on a phone.

Anybody in an office, a waiting room, or beside somebody asleep.

Anybody whose first language is not English, for whom reading is frequently easier than listening.

And anybody watching in a noisy environment, such as a workshop or a van.

The proportion who watch silently

Larger than most businesses expect, and it is the argument that persuades where accessibility alone does not.

On social platforms, video autoplays muted by default, so the first several seconds are always silent.

A meaningful majority of mobile video is watched without sound, by choice, in situations where turning it on is not an option.

Which means an uncaptioned video is not merely inaccessible to some people. It is ineffective for most people who encounter it.

A business paying for video production and skipping captions has spent the money and withheld the delivery.

Captions against subtitles against transcripts

For a business video, closed captions plus a transcript on the page covers almost every situation, and the transcript is also readable by search engines.

Automatic captions

Better than they were, not good enough alone, and the failure mode is specific.

Accuracy on clear speech in a quiet room is reasonably high. It falls sharply with accents, background noise, technical terms and proper nouns.

Which means the words most important to a business, its own name, its products, and its trade vocabulary, are the words most likely to be wrong.

Automatic captions also handle punctuation and speaker changes poorly, producing a continuous stream that is hard to follow.

The workable approach is generating them automatically and then correcting them, which takes a fraction of the time of writing from scratch and produces something accurate.

A worked example

A business that produced a short explainer video and left the automatic captions uncorrected.

Their trade name appeared as three different incorrect spellings across ninety seconds, and a key technical term was consistently rendered as something unrelated.

Anybody relying on the captions received a confusing account of a service they were considering.

Correcting them took about twenty minutes against a production that had cost considerably more.

They also published the corrected text as a transcript beneath the video, which began appearing in search results for phrases that were spoken in the video and existed nowhere else on the site.

The transcript turned out to be the more valuable of the two additions, which nobody had anticipated.

The transcript

Under-used and the cheapest part of this.

Once captions exist, the transcript is largely written. It needs light editing into paragraphs and it is done.

What it gains: readable by anybody who would rather not watch a video, searchable by search engines, quotable, and usable by somebody on a slow connection who will never load the video at all.

A proportion of people simply prefer reading, and a video with no transcript excludes them by preference rather than by impairment.

For a business, that is a considerable share of a professional audience.

Where the captions should live

A practical point that decides whether they exist across platforms.

Captions uploaded to one video platform stay there. The same video posted elsewhere carries none unless they are uploaded again.

Which means a business posting the same clip to three places needs to add captions three times, and frequently does it once.

The alternative is burning the captions into the picture, so they travel with the file wherever it goes.

That costs the ability to turn them off and guarantees they are always present, which for short social video is usually the better trade.

For a longer video embedded on your own site, a separate caption file is better, since it can be corrected without re-rendering anything.

The counter-case

Where captions are not required.

A silent decorative loop with no speech and no meaningful audio, which needs nothing beyond not autoplaying with sound.

Video where all the information is visual and stated in the surrounding text, though this is rarer than people claim.

Even then, an indication of what the video contains is worth having, since somebody who cannot see it has no idea whether it matters.

What is never a counter-case is that the video is short, since a thirty-second video is thirty seconds of information somebody cannot access.

What it costs

Worth stating, because the assumption is that it is expensive.

Automatic captions are free on every major platform and take minutes to generate.

Correcting them is the real cost, and it runs at roughly the length of the video multiplied by three or four for somebody who knows the material.

A three-minute video is therefore about fifteen minutes of somebody's afternoon.

Professional captioning exists and is priced per minute, and it is worth it for anything long, technical, or with multiple speakers.

Against a production budget of any size, none of this is a meaningful line item, which makes skipping it a decision rather than a constraint.

Audio description

The other half, and the one small businesses rarely need in full.

Where a video conveys information visually that is not stated aloud, somebody who cannot see it misses that information.

Full audio description is a production task and is disproportionate for most small business video.

The practical alternative is writing the video so that what is shown is also said: naming the thing being pointed at rather than saying this one here.

That costs nothing at the scripting stage, makes the video better for everybody, and removes most of the need for description afterwards.

What to do

  1. Generate automatic captions for anything already published.
  2. Correct them, particularly names and trade terms.
  3. Publish a transcript beneath the video.
  4. Do not autoplay with sound.
  5. Write future scripts so what is shown is also said.
  6. Budget captions as part of any production.

The third is the one with the largest return for the effort, and the one most often skipped because it feels redundant next to the video.

The autoplay side of this is covered in autoplay, sound and the back button.

Frequently asked questions

Who cannot hear a video?

People who are deaf or hard of hearing, anybody watching in public without headphones, anybody in an office, non-native speakers, and anybody in a noisy workshop.

How many people watch without sound?

A meaningful majority of mobile video. On social platforms video autoplays muted, so an uncaptioned video is ineffective for most people who encounter it.

Are automatic captions good enough?

Not alone. Accuracy falls with accents, noise and proper nouns, which means your business name and trade terms are the words most likely to be wrong.

What is the workable approach?

Generate automatically then correct, which takes a fraction of writing from scratch. Twenty minutes against a production costing far more.

Is a transcript worth publishing?

Yes, and it is the cheapest part. Once captions exist the transcript is largely written, and it is searchable, quotable and preferred by many readers.

What about audio description?

Full description is disproportionate for small business video. Writing scripts so that what is shown is also said removes most of the need.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Paid for a video and skipped the captions?

Most viewers watch it silently, so the money was spent and the message was withheld.

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