Ever paid serious attention to the accessibility of the subtitles or captions in your video or audio service or website? Ever tried an AI tool, such as Valossa Transcribe Pro™ , that assists you to augment media content with accessibility improving supporting data, such as captions and transcripts? Maybe you should, because the matter is more important than one could first realize.
Accessibility must not be just an afterthought, and neither must it be conceived as something that only has meaning to a negligibly small group of disabled users.
Formats and Standards for Accessibility
The W3C acknowledges the overarching importance of content accessibility on the web and in media applications, providing several accessibility-related guidelines and technical specifications.
Harmonizing not only the guidelines for human-centric aspects of web accessibility but also the technical foundation for solutions that contribute to accessibility, the W3C standardizes, among other things, the WebVTT format for metadata (captions, text video descriptions etc.) that is time-aligned with audio or video content, the TTML format for representing timed text media (subtitling and captioning) for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems, and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) web standard that provides tools towards a dual aim: making the content authoring tools themselves accessible, and facilitating the creation of content that conforms to the to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Furthermore, the UAAG documents by W3C explain how to design user agents, such as media players, browsers and reader applications in a way that allows the user agents to be accessible for people with disabilities.
Inclusivity Increases Reach
Inclusivity is an important facet of accessibility. Different people perceive the world around them differently, process information differently and consume content differently. As a simple to understand example, hundreds of millions of people around the globe have hearing impairments. Whenever a greater subset of the population practically gains access to your content, inclusivity goes up, both in your services and in the world at large.
Specifically, the already mentioned international WCAG standard explains how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. This, obviously, conforms with what typically is meant with accessibility in the mainstream sense of the word. What is less obvious is that the gamut of human disabilities is not restricted to physical ailments and injuries in body parts such as limbs or sensory organs.
For people with cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities or various types of neurodiversity, including but not limited to ADHD, dyslexia and dementia, the cognitive accessibility of content is important, allowing these users to access content in various formats and modalities and also allowing the presentation of the information to be changed according to the users’ needs or preferences. For a person with cognitive challenges, showing the speech parts from the audio content of a media item as a clear speech-to-text rendition may prove crucial for making sense of the content.
Accessibility of your video and audio content is greatly enhanced by integrating subtitles or captions to the application or service that caters the content to your users. Improved accessibility, in turn, brings a wide array of positive effects, many of which might not be immediately obvious to service providers who actually make the decisions affecting the accessibility for their users.
Plenty of Benefits with Accessible Video
Repurposing of content, for instance, should be a low-hanging fruit to content owners who want to monetize their assets more effectively. The availability of high-quality captions and other accessibility-enhancing derivatives of your content will facilitate content repurposing, so, even from the viewpoint of asset repurposing business strategies a boost in accessibility is a smart move that pays off in the long run.
When improving accessibility, not only the disabled users benefit from it: anyone can enjoy the benefits of an accessibility-first designed application or service. As a striking example, 85 per cent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, highlighting the immense importance of video subtitles for the general audience. Moreover, the textual presentation of audio or speech content is beneficial from the viewpoint of those 65 per cent of the world population who are visual learners and thus prefer visual content for the purpose of ingesting new information.
In addition to the more obvious places such as Netflix-style video-on-demand services, captions are routinely used even in games and online meeting apps such as Zoom or Google Meet. And it doesn’t need to be just speech content that is transcribed in captions: the captions can also indicate a plethora of contextual details and interpretation hints, such as sarcasm in the voice, contextually meaningful noises or information about the music being played in the scene.
Simply put, captions increase ROI and audience. With that in mind, we have built Valossa Transcribe Pro™ to generate high quality captions, speech and visual transcripts even for multilingual content. The tool has been designed for media creators to reap the benefits of the video to text speech and visual transcription and increase their audience engagement that way.
Everyone wins, when service providers decide to take steps that make their content more accessible.
The Benefits of High Quality Transcripts and Captions for Video Editing, Content Repurposing and SEO
Boosting captions with AI is a gift that just keeps on giving! Having proper speech-to-text and captioning techniques helps greatly during and prior to creating rough cuts in post production. Keeping track of the speech content and other describable facets of the raw media is key in making sense of the created and recorded raw footage coming from the production. Video logging, speech transcribing and clip finding becomes a big time investment particularly for non-scripted video and audio production. Even just the automatic transcription of raw-content speech unlocks a treasure trove of productivity during media content creation.
Accessibility is not only for inclusivity, it is also important for SEO and discoverability. Making content searchable is very important in today’s Internet and in the consumer-facing applications with their huge content libraries. So, an investment to accessible captions and subtitles is simultaneously an investment towards better content reach in the online environment.
Readily available speech-to-text representations of content are also helpful for users who are viewing audio-containing media in a noisy environment or who might not be native speakers of the language that is used in the media being consumed.
Even in TikTok, captions are hugely popular and, as worded by linguistics Professor Paula Winke, they can be described as “glasses for your ears” when viewing videos. Funnily enough, in the past many native English speakers thought captions to be a nuisance in movies and TV shows, while today captions are an integral part of the enjoyable everyday video experience on social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram.
As aptly noted by Sebastian Greger, the UX boon from closed captions is for everybody.
Some Definitions for Captions and Subtitles
While some people undoubtedly use the words interchangeably, there are actually differences in the meaning of the words “subtitles” and “closed captions”, and it is good to understand the differentiating factors, which boil down to the distinction that closed captions are primarily targeted towards users who have problems with hearing while subtitles are for users who can hear well but might not understand the spoken language. Obviously, both these types of texting are ultimately techniques that serve either directly or indirectly the accessibility of content.
It is useful to know the basics of how subtitles and captions can be categorized further. Broadly speaking, according to ADA Site Compliance, there are three types of subtitles: SDH subtitles (“Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing”), non-SDH subtitles for simply breaking the language barrier, and forced (or compelled) subtitles that clarify the context of something happening on-screen for the audience when the language setting of the media item is primarily familiar. As you can see from these definitions, in the concept of SDH subtitles there is some overlap with closed captions which provide information about non-verbal cues for the viewer.
The term “closed captions” surely causes some confusion. Are there also “open” captions, since people usually mention only the “closed” kind? Actually, open captions is a thing. Closed captions can be turned off by the user and could also typically be adjusted in various ways, while open captions are burned to the media itself and consequently cannot be turned off.
The Best AI Transcription Tools Combine Quality, Performance and Effortless Human Curation
Accuracy of the existing, AI-created subtitles in the various content-delivery platforms might not be very high — a gap that Valossa Transcribe Pro™’s AI multi-purpose tool is built to surpass with a low word error rate automatic speech and visual transcriptions, and a good editing software to fix any remaining mistakes. The lack of accuracy contributes negatively to the attainable level of accessibility and to the overall user experience. Thus it makes total sense to pick a captioning or subtitling service that is worth your trust and long-term commitment.
Why not start making AI-powered accessibility improvements for the audio or video content in your media service today?
With Valossa Transcribe Pro™ AI tools, you will achieve easy-to-use speech transcription, obtain automatically created captions and subtitles, and even visual content descriptions for versatile captioning and content logging.
Choose the Valossa Transcribe Pro™ product option that best suits your needs and witness first-hand how the power of an actually content creator-friendly AI system effortlessly transforms your video and audio assets into an experience accessible for all.