Video Captions

Web accessibility is essential for people with disabilities and useful for all. Learn about the impact of accessibility and the benefits for everyone in a variety of situations.

Video on Video Captions

This video information is available as a Text Transcript with Description of Visuals below.

What is “Video Captions”?

Captions are a text form of audio information in video and animations. This includes the words that are spoken, who is speaking when it is not evident, and important sounds like music, laughter, and noises. Captions must be synchronized with the visual content to contextualize them.

Who depends on this feature?

What are the additional benefits?

What needs to happen for this to work?

Captions must be made available with pre-recorded and live video content. Voice recognition software can help create captions for some type of videos. Sometimes such voice recognition software is built into the computer or social media platform. Automatically-generated captions often need editing. For many languages there are captioning services, often also remote services.

Learn more

Text Transcript with Description of Visuals

Audio Visual
Web Accessibility Perspectives: Video Captions Web Accessibility Perspectives:
Video Captions
Video isn't just about pictures, it's also about sound. Without the audio, you would have to guess what this film is about. A man sat at a desk starts watching a video on his computer.
[no sound] The video on his computer shows a person speaking to the camera. It is playing with no audio.
Frustrating isn't it? Not knowing what's going on. That's the situation for everyone who can't hear. The man watching the video has a hearing aid.
Captions make videos accessible. He turns on captions for the video playing.
Which is also handy for people who want to watch video in loud environments. Another man is watching the captioned video with a group of people chatting away next to him.
Or where you need to be very, very quiet. Turns out that they are in a library. The group is shushed by the librarian.
Web accessibility: Essential for some, useful for all. The video is shown playing with the captions on.
Visit w3.org/WAI/perspectives for more information on Video Captions Visit
w3.org/WAI/perspectives
for more information on
Video Captions.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative logo
Back to Top