There’s been a huge rise in video marketing in recent times, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Fuelled by social media platforms designed for sharing video content, such as TikTok and YouTube, this style of digital marketing provides a great way for your business to connect with customers locally and Australia wide.
You might also invest in video content creation designed to help train your staff. Providing team members with accessible ways of learning new skills can help foster diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
If you plan to publish video content, whether for external or internal audience, captions are needed to provide the audio content to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
To ensure everyone can access audio and video content, the Australia Government Style Manual advises that all audio-visual content must have:
Closed captions may also assist individuals watching videos in noisy environments, such as in busy offices or while in transit.
If your audience is culturally and linguistically diverse, you might also consider creating subtitles in other languages. This is not required to meet web accessibility standards but may help individuals understand your video content if it's been created in a language that they are not familiar with.
In short, adding closed captions or subtitles to video content helps your customers and employees to get the most out of your content. It can even help make your content easier to find. Search engines, like Google, can use subtitles to take a user directly to the section in your video that most aligns with what they’re searching for.
To learn more about closed captions and subtitles, you can visit the requirements and standards for video and audio page on the Australian Government’s official Style Manual website.
Here are three different ways to create closed captions and subtitles
Sometimes, people use “captions” and “subtitles” interchangeably. However, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) resource uses:
As defined by WAI, captions provide content to people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. Essentially, they are a text version of the speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the content.
Most are what we call “closed captions”. This means that the captions can be either hidden or shown by people watching the video. Sometimes, videos include “open captions” that can’t be turned off, though this captioning style is less common.
Ordinarily, subtitles provide language translations to help listeners understand content presented in a language they do not speak. According to WAI, subtitles usually only outline the spoken audio and can be a translation of the caption content, including non-speech audio information.
As outlined by WAI web accessibility guidelines, captions are needed for accessibility, whereas subtitles in other languages are not directly an accessibility accommodation.
If you want to maximise the impact of your content, it’s important to consider the needs of your widest audience. Think about your existing and potential customers or team members. What will help you connect with them most effectively?
Some large video sharing platforms, such as TikTok and YouTube, use speech recognition technology to generate auto captions. This style of captions is also sometimes referred to as “automatic captions”.
This may seem like a simple solution, but according to WAI, ‘automatically generated captions do not meet user needs or accessibility requirements, unless they are confirmed to be fully accurate.’ Furthermore, auto captions usually need significant editing.
For this reason, auto captions generated by YouTube closed captioning and other tools like it should always be cross-checked for accuracy in the process of video content creation. The same rule applies for automatic subtitling, too.
As defined by business.gov.au, diversity in the workplace means that you employ people from a wide range of backgrounds. This includes employing people with disability.
Individuals with both cognitive and physical disability work in all industries in Australia, and contribute a range of skills, talents, and experience to small and medium businesses.
If your business invests in video content creation, you may be better positioned to train people who may need to learn in a visual or audio format.
Benefits of diversity in the workplace include helping your business to foster a culture of creativity and innovation and encouraging higher employee engagement. Working with video content that includes closed captions and subtitles is just one way to help you build a more inclusive workplace.
And by fostering a diverse and accessible workforce, you’ll help build your capability and confidence in supporting the diverse needs that exist in the community.
In many ways, video content creation can form part of an introduction to digitisation for business. For this reason, it helps to first think carefully about how you want to use this kind of media to serve your short and long-term business plan.
Once you know how audio-visual content fits with your strategy, you can start thinking about how to add captions to video content and generate subtitles.
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