Sept. 27, 2021

This paid piece is sponsored by Click Rain.

Since becoming a law in 1990, the Americans With Disabilities Act has protected the civil rights of individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life — from curb ramps and Braille signage to employment opportunities and beyond. The ADA was a grand step toward civil equality.

But “public life” has evolved since 1990, especially under the influence of the internet. Although the ADA could not explicitly define all civil rights related to the internet back then, the law still applies in principle today. One current example is video captions.

Captions display the audio portion of a video as text along the bottom of the screen. If video plays any role in your digital marketing or online presence, there are plenty of reasons why you should consider adding such captions — beyond legal compliance. In this article we’ll cover the top three.

1. Many people need captions.

Individuals who cannot hear need captions to fully experience videos with audio content. For this reason, captions are required by law for most videos played in public spaces.

In 2010, the National Association of the Deaf filed a lawsuit against Netflix, a “place of public accommodation,” claiming that the company discriminated against deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals by not offering closed captions on many of its videos.

Long story short, Netflix settled by agreeing to caption all of its online videos by 2014. This was the first time the ADA was interpreted to apply to an exclusively online business, and it probably won’t be the last.

But even when they’re not required by law, captions help your videos reach a wider audience and make the internet a bit more fair for everyone. And why wouldn’t you want that?

2. Most people appreciate captions.

While many of us practically live in our earbuds these days, you probably can think of a time when you wanted to watch a video online but couldn’t rely on the audio because of your surroundings: quiet library, waiting room, airplane, etc.

Captions come to the rescue here, too, allowing more viewers to access your videos wherever they happen to be. Like other forms of web accessibility, captions are “essential for some, useful for all.”

3. Even search engines love captions.

Google is pretty smart, but it can’t watch your videos. Google can and does read your video captions, however, and factors in that content when ranking search results. This means that adding captions to your videos can improve your SEO, helping your business rank higher on Google and YouTube.

It’s no coincidence that video captions are good for people and good for business — they’re good for business because they’re good for people.

If you’re ready to make your videos more accessible with captions, check out a recent blog post with a few best practices from Andy Dykstra, Click Rain’s video production strategist.

For information on captions and inspiring video ideas, contact Click Rain.