Making video captions useful for accessibility

What captions have to carry

For a deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer, captions carry everything the soundtrack carries. Guidance from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative describes captions as conveying dialogue and meaningful sound information. A transcript of the words alone misses the half of the soundtrack that is not speech.

That does not mean describing every sound. It means the ones a viewer needs to follow what is happening.

Adding what the transcript misses

Clipy transcribes the spoken words automatically and does not add speaker names or sound effects on its own. Both are quick to add in the editor: type them into the subtitle text alongside the words, and adjust timing so a sound note appears when the sound happens.

1. Generate the transcript from your video, up to 250 MB and 10 minutes.
2. Correct names and terms against the audio.
3. Add speaker names where more than one person speaks.
4. Add short notes for meaningful sounds, such as a phone ringing.
5. Tighten timings and check the rendered result before export.

Checking the result

Watch the video muted with captions on: if you can follow the story, the captions are doing their job. The editing preview is approximate, so make this check on the exported file. Export burned-in captions so the text travels inside the MP4, or SRT or VTT where a platform renders them.

Common questions

Further reading

• W3C WAI: Captions for audio and video