What is Unclear About Captioning?

Does your business know about the need for captioning?This recent article might be a wake-up call for people in the United States: Who is Required to Close-Caption?

With only a few exceptions, all programming for broadcast in the United States must be closed captioned.

Fortunately, the article includes the FCC fact sheet for more closed captioning information.

If you make instructional videos, do you want to leave out the potential audience segment that is deaf or hard-of-hearing? Read what one hard-of-hearing person experiences: no captions means you lose a visitor or client.

For one source of information about captioning, we suggest you turn to Twitter and follow the stream of tweets from the people on our Twitter list for topics about deafness, hearing impairments, and captioning. They are the source for much of the information in this article.

There is so much catching up to do with captioning, so once again, we point you to these other great resources for captioning:

• Stanford Captioning
• Captioning Key for educational media
• Resources from Bill Creswell, the captioning-the-internet-one-video-at-a-time guy

In fact, watch Bill Creswell’s video (no sound needed!) to get the message:

Quick note for blind or low-vision readers. Bill Creswell couldn’t get his microphone to work when making this video. Then he realized that his technical difficulty demonstrated the problem hearing-impaired people have with videos. It’s as though someone forgot to turn on their microphone!

I am not deaf and I am not hard-of-hearing. So why do I write this article?

• Because I believe technical communicators are perfectly positioned to introduce and include concepts like captioning into businesses
• Because it is a part of any decent, sensible content strategy
• Because I find subtitles and captions on television quite handy when I want to catch a phrase that was garbled by the actor’s poor articulation
• Because I believe it is a natural service to offer for any business
• Because I got my socks knocked off when I read Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices and began to view deafness as a culture, not a disability
• Because it is a matter of human decency