As more businesses shift to digital, it becomes important to be more inclusive and consider the needs of all audiences. This is why closed captioning is important!

Captions are crucial for enhancing accessibility for users with visual impairments. You must have heard this sentence a lot over the past couple of years. Captioning technology has undergone a significant revolution in recent years, and with advancements in artificial intelligence, AI-powered live captioning has achieved a level of 98% accuracy.

However, while some people may consider adding captions burdensome, the truth is that it is a necessity in today’s day and age. With widespread regulations, industries must ensure that they provide captioning or subtitles as part of all their video content to ensure equal access for individuals with disabilities.

Thankfully, this process no longer needs to be done manually, which can be challenging for video-intensive industries. AI has significantly streamlined the process of captioning video content, and this guide highlights how this technology has changed video captioning services.

Table of Contents:

What are Video Captioning Services?

Video captioning services are the process of creating and adding text captions to digital videos. There are two main types of video captioning: open and closed.

Open captions are always visible on the screen and cannot be turned off by the user. Closed captions are optional and can be turned on or off by the user.

Why is Captioning Important?

Captioning plays a crucial role in the video for various reasons. While we’ve already touched upon its benefits in terms of accessibility in the introduction, there are several other reasons to ensure your videos include captions:

  • Statistics show that 92% of smartphone users in the US consume video without sound, making it crucial that your video has captions if you want users to continue engaging with your content.
  • Videos with captions have longer viewing times. Additionally, they can help viewers easily comprehend your videos, especially when the language used differs from that of the viewer.
  • Search engines can’t index videos. Still, they do index text, and adding captions to your videos makes it easier for them to identify, index, and then provide your videos to a user for their targeted search query. This can easily be achieved using an AI subtitle generator.
  • AI-generated captions enable individuals with hearing impairments to continue engaging with your content, despite the challenges presented by their disabilities.

What are Closed Captions?

Closed captions are text-based representations of audio content in a video. In addition to the spoken words, closed captioning also includes relevant sounds and other music cues.

While closed captioning was primarily created as a tool of video accessibility to help people with hearing impairments, it can be used in various other scenarios as well. Captions, for instance, can be read even when audio is unavailable or the viewers are in a noisy environment.

What are Closed Captioning Services?

Closed captioning services provide accurate and clear captions based on the videos or live streams to make the video content accessible in text to everyone.

Closed captions play a crucial role in ensuring that individuals with hearing challenges can easily access the ever-evolving landscape of multimedia content. This enables them to understand video content without any restrictions on physical capabilities.

Furthermore, closed captions cater to the needs of the general public. They can understand videos available in other languages with the help of easy-to-read transcribed content. Therefore, the quality of the closed captions must be unmatched to cater to their needs.

What are the Types of Closed Captions?

There are three primary types of closed captions:

  1. Pop-On Captions: These captions pop up as blocks of text on the screen, typically positioned at the bottom. They are synchronized with the audio and change every few seconds. Pop-on captions can incorporate effects and speaker identifications, and they are commonly used in pre-recorded videos, such as movies, TV shows, and online videos.
  2. Roll-Up Captions: Roll-up captions, as the name suggests, scroll up the screen, usually from the bottom. These captions are always displayed one line at a time, with each new line pushing the previous one up. Roll-up captions are primarily used for real-time videos, such as news broadcasts, sports events, and live shows. They don’t include effects or speaker identifications and tend to have slight delays or errors due to variations in the speed of the speech.
  3. Paint-On Captions: These closed captions gradually appear on the screen word by word and are synchronized to the speaker’s mouth movements. They are often positioned near the speaker’s face or at the bottom of the screen. Paint-on captions can also include effects and speaker identification. Once popular in animated or music videos, they are now rarely used.

Whatever type of closed caption you wish to use, it’s always best to use a professional closed captioning service to get the job done. The industry standard for closed captioning is 99% accuracy, which is a high bar. After all, since accessibility is the primary focus of this exercise, accuracy matters, and in these instances, it is better to let professionals do what they do best.

What are the Closed Captioning Formats?

Although there are a multitude of closed captioning formats that have been used over the years, there are four that are primarily used today. They are

Name of the Format Description Primary Features Compatible with
SRT SRT is a widely used format that consists of plain text files with the caption text and the start and end time codes for each caption. Easy to create and edit with any text editor. Supports basic formatting such as bold, italic, and underline. Compatible with many online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Windows Media Player.
WebVTT A newer format is designed for web-based videos, HTML5 video players, and streaming services. Supports more features than SRT files, such as styling, positioning, and metadata. It can also include cues for chapters, thumbnails, and navigation. Compatible with platforms such as Vimeo, Brightcove, JW Player, MediaCore, and Netflix.
DFXP A timed-text format using XML encodes the caption text and timing information. Supports multiple languages, regions, and styles within the same file. It can also include semantic information such as speaker names, roles, and emotions. Compatible with platforms such as Adobe Flash, Flowplayer, Kaltura, MediaSite, and Ooyala.
SCC A format that is used for broadcast television and DVD captions. It uses binary code to represent the caption text and timing information. The captions can also include color, font, and position information. Recommended by YouTube for uploading captions to their platform.

What is the Importance of Closed Captions?

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, video consumption is skyrocketing at a mind-boggling pace, and ensuring equal access to all the fascinating content out there is a basic right, whether for entertainment or education.

Based on a market research report, the closed captioning services market is projected to witness significant growth. It is anticipated to increase from USD 5.6 billion in 2023 to USD 8.1 billion by 2028, with a growth rate of 7.7%. This data highlights the significance of captioning as both an essential requirement and a profitable prospect for content creators and service providers.

Adding closed Captions to video content also helps with video SEO, which can help video content rank better on Google searches.

Finally, depending on your country, you may be required by law to add closed captions to your content. Enlisting closed captioning companies to generate accurate and good-quality closed captions will also help your videos be legally compliant.

The AI Transformation in Closed Captioning Services

The traditional approach to creating accurate and timely captions was entirely manual and, more often than not, time-consuming. The task required audio interpreters or transcribers, typists, and a wealth of resources, which led to higher costs and low efficiency.

This challenge was exacerbated when dealing with live video captioning.

However, with the introduction of AI-enabled closed captioning, speech-to-text technology has witnessed massive improvement. This technology relies heavily on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to interpret and transcribe captions with almost minimal latency.

This technology has only been improving with time, especially since improved data does not back AI models and is much more receptive to training. The impact of this technology across industries is tremendous, especially in education.

How Does AI-Enabled Closed Captioning Work?

AI-enabled or automatic captions convert speech into text that reflects on the screen in real-time in the same language as the speech.

Automated speech recognition, or ASR, is a type of artificial intelligence used to produce transcripts of spoken sentences.

Several AI-powered translation engines are available to automatically translate captions that appear in different languages. This is also known as machine-translated captions or machine-translated subtitles.

The process of AI-enabled closed captioning involves below steps in general:

  • Preprocessing Stage: This stage involves extracting all relevant features from the given input data.
  • Encoding Stage: During the encoding stage, various extracted features are encoded so the AI captioning model can understand them.
  • Caption Generation Stage: This stage involves a recurrent neural network or transformer-based model that generates captions using previous context, words, and training data, thereby accurately predicting each subsequent word.
  • Evaluation Stage: In this stage, the generated closed captions are assessed for quality and accuracy compared to reference captions.
  • Fine-Tuning Stage: This is the final stage where the model can be refined to improve and refine the final outputs.

How Has AI Impacted Captioning Technology?

Artificial intelligence has had a tremendous impact on captioning technology. It’s evident at this point that the use of captions doesn’t just cater to those with hearing disabilities but also to those who simply don’t use sound while consuming content in the form of videos.

Those businesses that have leveraged the power of AI in closed captioning have witnessed its impact, and in this section, we examine the various ways in which AI has influenced closed captioning.

1. AI Offers Speed and Affordability in Live Captioning

Traditional closed captioning relied on human stenographers to transcribe speech before creating captions to go with it. However, closed captioning AI has disrupted the status quo in more ways than one. Automated speech-to-text technology can now generate captions in real-time with almost complete accuracy.

This has had an impact across a host of sectors, with education being a key beneficiary. The shift from traditional rote learning to online instruction has made education much more accessible. Physical barriers no longer stand in the way, and with AI-powered closed captioning, education has become much more equitable for those with disabilities.

This access has benefited not only those with impairments but also those whose native language is different from the language of instruction. A study showed that 66% of ESL students found captions extremely helpful in learning.

Major credit for such accessibility goes to regulations by the ADA and FCC, which mandate the use of captions to make video content fully accessible.

2. Real-Time Accuracy Across a Wide Range of Media

Education is one of many sectors that have benefited from the advent of AI live captioning. Speech-to-text technology today has reached a point where it can offer real-time accuracy across a wide range of media, including webinars, videos, podcasts, and a lot more, and so at a fraction of the cost.

This level of accuracy has a host of benefits. For instance, it has helped those with hearing impairments reduce their dependence on others to understand key financial concepts or other related materials. It has also helped these segments of the population access accurate information, which is critical when dealing with banks, finances, and investments.

3. Offers Immense SEO Benefits

Search engines are not equipped to hear content in the form of audio – they need to be told what content other forms contain for them to index and recommend them. This is where closed caption, especially when seamlessly generated using the power of AI, can play a key role.

Captions accompanying text in audio and video make it searchable, allowing your content to appear in search results and become easier to find and engage with.

4. Helps Break Language Barriers

AI tools, such as Equalsense, offer support across multiple languages, ensuring that your content reaches a broader audience beyond English speakers. In fact, statistics indicate that by 2020, the US had a total of 4.9 million English Learners enrolled in primary and secondary schools.

This number is limited to schools alone; think about how many English Learners you could engage if your business could generate accurate captions in real-time across a wide range of languages.

Multilingual support for AI-powered closed captioning enables you to reach a wider audience, thereby expanding your business’s global reach and ensuring greater accessibility.

Five Reasons to Use AI-Powered Closed Captioning for Your Business

Closed captioning comes with a range of interesting benefits for businesses, such as better accessibility, improved SEO, and wider customer reach.

Here are some of the reasons why businesses should consider adding closed captions to their content:

1. Enhances User Experience

AI-powered closed captioning uses artificial intelligence technology to offer a range of features and improve the overall user experience.

For instance, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) feature allows transcriptions to be done in real-time, thus eliminating the need for manual captioning.

This also means that users cannot wait and can instantly access captions to enjoy their video captioning without interruption. In addition to this, AI algorithms also help generate captions for archived content.

This helps make previously inaccessible material easily available to all users. It also provides an excellent opportunity to reach a wider audience and ensures that content is accessible to everyone.

2. Helps Improve Accessibility

With over 5% of the world’s population suffering from hearing loss, it’s important to ensure that video content is available to everyone, regardless of disability. One of the key benefits of AI-powered closed captioning is that it enables all individuals to enjoy the business’s video content equally.

Whether customers have hearing impairments or any other similar disability, closed captions ensure that these individuals are not excluded from your messaging when you offer more accessibility measures.

This means that businesses offering video captioning help consumers easily follow their videos and access the same information as everyone else. Including closed captions demonstrates inclusivity and accessibility in your videos and webinars, and enables everyone to engage with your content.

3. Indexing for SEO

AI-enabled closed captioning can also help businesses improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

This is because closed captions in AI offer additional text that can be indexed by top search engines such as Google, which can help improve the content’s visibility and ranking in search results.

By using closed captioning in digital content such as videos and audio, businesses can demonstrate their commitment to inclusivity and accessibility while also improving the user experience, complying with legal requirements, and increasing engagement, conversions, and SEO.

4. Help Keep Compliance in Check

One other important reason to use AI-based closed captioning is that it allows businesses to comply with region-specific regulations and compliance. An increasing number of countries require businesses and content creators to include subtitles and captions in the content they offer to users.

Apart from ensuring that your business maintains compliance and adheres to all regulations, offering closed captioning in your content also demonstrates your efforts and commitment to building a website or providing content that meets the required standards of web accessibility and inclusivity.

Yet another advantage of AI-powered video captioning is the ease of understanding it offers to users who have difficulty understanding spoken language, such as individuals with various learning disabilities.

5. Users Spend More Time with Video Watch Time

AI-powered closed captioning is an excellent way to ensure that users spend more time watching videos on your website because they are easier to understand.

Data also supports the fact that captions increase video views by 12% as compared to videos without captions.

Therefore, it is essential to incorporate an AI-powered live captioning feature into the video content you offer users, along with a video autoplay feature that is widely available on most platforms.

A Few Key Tools for Making Your Videos Accessible

Ensuring your videos are accessible means using various tools and technologies.

Let’s look at the important tools that help make videos accessible:

  • Automatic Captioning Tools: These tools accurately convert spoken words into written text, benefiting those who prefer reading or need written references.
  • Transcription Services: Transcription services transform spoken words into written text precisely, aiding people who need written references or prefer reading.
  • Descriptive Audio Tools: These tools describe visual elements in videos, providing extra information for visually impaired individuals.
  • Speech-to-Text Software: This software instantly transcribes spoken words into written text, making it useful for live events and ensuring content accessibility in real-time.
  • Semantic HTML5 Markup: Assigning meaning to webpage elements, making it easier for screen readers to interpret and convey content to visually impaired users. This enhances user experience and inclusivity online.
  • Accessibility Testing Tools: These tools assess whether your video content complies with accessibility standards like WCAG, helping to identify and resolve potential issues.
  • Player Customization Features: Video players with customization options allow users to adjust parameters like font size and playback speed, catering to various user requirements and preferences.
  • Text-to-Speech Technology: This technology reads written text aloud, assisting those who struggle with reading or prefer auditory learning.
  • Interactive Transcript Plugins: Users can interact with video transcripts while watching, clicking on sections to navigate to corresponding scenes.

Addressing Video Accessibility Misconceptions

Let’s clear up some common misconceptions about video accessibility:

Myth 1: “Only deaf people benefit from captions.”

Reality: Captions benefit not only the deaf but also those who prefer reading, are in noisy environments, or are non-native speakers, enhancing the viewing experience for all.

Myth 2: “Transcripts are solely for SEO.”

Reality: While transcripts aid in SEO, they also serve other purposes. They provide a textual representation of spoken content for better comprehension, especially for those who need a reference or prefer reading.

Myth 3: “Descriptions are optional”

Reality: Descriptions are crucial for creating an inclusive experience, providing essential information about visual elements for users with visual impairments. They are necessary for a complete video experience, not optional.

Conclusion

Video captioning services make digital videos accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. By providing text alternatives for the audio content of videos, they can also positively impact user experience and engagement.

These services can enhance video content’s quality and performance by increasing its SEO, SMO, retention, and comprehension. If you want video captioning services for your video content, you can trust Hurix Digital to provide you with the best solutions.

Hurix Digital has the expertise, experience, and captioning technology to create and deliver high-quality and accurate video scripts for any type of content in any language and format at any time and budget.

Contact us today to learn more about Hurix Digital’s video captioning services and other digital solutions!