The Trend Towards Accessibility in Video Production
When producing video content, you should always keep your audience top of mind. More and more often, organizations are realizing that accessibility features like captions and translations can help grab the attention of a wider audience.
Captions
Most people are familiar with closed captioning. It’s encoded into television programming and can be turned on and off with your remote control. This type of captioning isn’t pretty, but it is functional. It gives people with hearing impairments and those in noisy environments the ability to understand what’s happening on screen. Captions are now prevalent in online video as well, either as a track you can turn “on” and “off” or as text burned right into the video image. This is common for much of the video you see on social media.
Captions also help those who may be scrolling through their social media feed in a noisy environment or with the sound off. They can also give your video an SEO boost. SRT files can be uploaded to many platforms and allow viewers to turn captions on and off. Google will scour an SRT file to learn more about the content of your video, increasing your keyword depth.
There are many options for creating “burned in” captions for your video content. You can transcribe your video using an AI tool in Adobe Premier, edit the transcription for accuracy, then use that to create captions in a number of styles all within the editing platform. You can have your video transcribed and captioned by a post-production house. This process will provide an added layer of quality control which can be crucial, particularly with longer content. Lastly, many social media platforms have built-in tools for captioning videos. Just be sure to have an accurate transcription of your video to start with. Services like Rev.com can help.
Translations
Recently, many of my clients have opted to translate their content in addition to adding captions. YouTube will allow you to upload SRTs in multiple languages for one video, allowing the viewer to turn on captions in the language of their choice. You might also choose to make an entirely separate version of your video, translating the captions as well as the text that appears on screen and providing narration in another language. Keep in mind that it can take longer to say something in another language than it does in English. It is not uncommon to have to lengthen a video to make room for Spanish voiceover.
I live in Washington, D.C. and I’m originally from Rochester, N.Y. Both cities have large deaf and hard of hearing populations. Creating an American Sign Language (ASL) version of a video can help engage this audience beyond simply providing captions. You can do so by filming an ASL interpreter signing your video content, then creating a “picture in picture” version.
Captioning and translations are typically done at the very end of a project, so it’s important to include time in your schedule to accommodate these processes. If your subject is technical, it may help to have a native speaker familiar with your topic weigh in on the translation. If you’re thinking about translating your video into a language that uses another alphabet, like Amharic or Greek, you may need to work with an editor who speaks that language, and develop a quality control process to make sure the work is accurate.
Make your video content is as easy to consume as possible. Think about your audience at the beginning of the project, and plan ahead to ensure you have the resources and the time to provide the necessary accessibility options.
