
The growth of closed captions has coincided with the growth of mobile video consumption as more people watch videos in public places with the sound muted. With the growth of global video platforms, many video owners see the value of adding subtitles making their content available in multiple languages. Essentially, subtitles assume an audience can hear the audio, but need the dialogue provided in text form as well. Subtitles allow people to watch videos even when they themsleves don’t speak the language.
The coronavirus has turned the world upside down for many but especially the deaf and hard of hearing.Subtitles and captions have different goals Until recently, Twitter has supported CEA-style captions in a limited capacity that are enabled when a user has turned on closed captioning through the. ASL interpreters: Why the latter is a COVID-19 lifeline for the deaf. However, while subtitles involve translating the video’s language into an alternate language, closed captions are in the same language as the audio.Ĭlosed captions are created to allow deaf and hard-of-hearing people to experience the video, so they includes background sounds and speaker changes. Subtitles assume the viewer hears the audio and as a result do not contain the background sounds or notifications for speaker changes. Some people refer to closed captions and subtitles interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction.īoth closed captions and subtitles are the text version of the spoken audio in a video. Users can generally toggle subtitles on and off, and many large platforms allow you to choose subtitles in a broad range of languages. Edit the captions while playing back your video to make sure the captions are accurate.
