Accessible captions in video

Milo_Alumni

Hi Online Community

Scope’s Digital Film and Media team would love your opinion on something, so we would be grateful if you could take a second to read this post.

At Scope we aim to make sure all our video content (like everything else we do) is fully accessible. At the moment we are looking into how we create video content for Facebook and the best way to include captions.

There are two main categories for captioning: Open Captions and Closed Captions

Open captions are part of the actual picture so cannot be turned off or changed in any way by the viewer. Most videos on Facebook that have captions will use this sort.

Closed captions are a separate element that can be turned on or off as well as including options to edit size, position, colour and contrast.

We have a couple of questions about how accessible these alternatives are and we would be so happy if you could share your wisdom with us:

1.       Have you seen videos on Facebook or elsewhere with open captions (the ones you can’t turn off) that you found to be inaccessible?

2.       Are screen-readers ever used to read captions? If you use a screen-reader, does it work with closed captions?

3.       What would you think if Scope posted videos to Facebook with open captions along with a link to an alternative version with closed captions on YouTube?

If you have any other thoughts on this topic please let us know.

 

Thanks so much in advance!

Milo

(Digital Film and Media Officer)