Capitalise with video captioning

Nov 26 2009 by Rob Colling, The Journal

A FEW years ago, the internet was mainly made of text and pictures. If you could see the screen, you could access the web.

Now? Not so much. As the costs of bandwidth and storage plummeted, the web filled up with video. I’d be the last person to argue that web video isn’t utterly brilliant, but in our rush to make all our pictures move we missed a couple of tricks. One was Google, and I’ll come to that in a moment. The other was accessibility.

Let’s start with deaf and hard-of-hearing web users. For them, the old text-and-pictures internet was perfect. Video spoiled the party, because without captions (subtitles for the deaf) they couldn’t watch it.

Many of the readers of this column are involved with websites in some way. Most of those sites have some video content, yet few have captions.

Everyone wants to do the right thing, but budgets only go so far. And deaf internet users are a tiny minority, right?

Wrong. Nine million people in the UK have a hearing impairment. That’s one in every seven people. If video doesn’t have captions, its potential audience immediately shrinks by 15%.

Personally, I’m an advocate of captions on principle – I think deaf people should have access to the web. But that 15% figure means there’s also a real commercial benefit to captioning your stuff: lots more people will watch it. The decision is about ROI as well as ethics.

Deaf people aren’t the only group affected, either. Millions of people surf the net in noisy places such as cafes or schools, or in quiet places like offices and libraries where they can’t turn up the volume. That’s a vast audience who can’t watch web video without captions.

But there’s an even more compelling commercial argument for captions. Closed captions (“closed” meaning they can be switched on and off) are a way to translate the dialogue in your video into text. And text is searchable by Google. I’ll leave you to imagine the implications of that.

Happily, captions are easy to implement. Flash Player, JW Player and Flowplayer use a simple plugin. YouTube and blip.tv offer closed caption support (although, to its shame, Vimeo refuses to follow suit). And, as you’d expect from Apple, iTunes and QuickTime have their own slightly deranged way of handling captions, which has both advantages and disadvantages over everyone else’s.

So captions are easy to offer, and they can bring people to your site who wouldn’t be interested in you otherwise.

I’d say it’s time to listen up.

:: Rob Colling is founder of www.internetsubtitling.com