Captions and audio description in videos

In short: Captions make spoken text and important sounds in videos readable, while audio description additionally narrates what’s happening visually. Both features help deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, and low-vision people fully understand content.

In more detail: While regular subtitles only reproduce dialogue, captions for the hearing-impaired also include notes about sounds, music, and speaker changes.

In detail

• Captions for the hearing-impaired (SDH): Show sound descriptions like “[door creaks]” or music cues in addition to dialogue.
• Automatic captions: Speech recognition systems generate captions automatically but are often error-prone with accents or background noise.
• Audio description: An additional audio track narrates visual elements like facial expressions, locations, or actions during pauses in speech.
• Legal requirements: Public broadcasters in many countries are required to offer a minimum share of their content in accessible formats.
• Creating your own: Platforms like YouTube allow uploading custom caption files instead of relying on automatic recognition.
• Benefits for everyone: Captions also help when watching without sound, learning a foreign language, or in a noisy environment (barrierefreiheit-im-internet).
• Quality differences: Professionally created captions are better timed and easier to read than automatically generated ones.