5 Reasons to Add Closed Captions to your Videos

Here at Capital Captions we understand the value and importance your movie can have if you add closed captions. We know that having the opportunity to read and understand the sound effects and background noises that are part of a feature film or video can make that all important difference to someone with a hearing impairment. But did you know that Closed Captions are not just there to help the deaf or hard of hearing?

Today we are having a look at five aspects of closed captioning that can have big effect’s on your movie. We’ll look at why adding Captions can make a big difference to your audience and make your film more desirable.

Make it more Accessible:

Let’s begin with the most obvious one; accessibility. It goes without saying that adding closed captions to your short-film or feature length movie will enable deaf or hard of hearing people enjoy your film. But did you know closed captions are not just added for the sole reason for deaf and hard of hearing. Having closed captions can enable a person watching your movie in a noisy environment to still enjoy your film. Other examples of where this is useful is public spaces, libraries and office/work environments.

Get more SEO Exposure:

Choosing to add closed captions to your movie also means more SEO. SEO is used by Google and other search engines to categorise and extract information from video by means of text. Closed Captions are read by YouTube and Google. Adding captions to your film is considered full text and can therefore be indexed by all the search engine companies. Another benefit of this is you can ‘tag’ keywords that you want to be found when customer’s do a search. We recommend extracting the key phrases from the video transcript and adding it to the topics of the film.

Expand locations and places viewers can watch:

A study by Ofcom suggests that 80% of viewers who watch social media videos online with closed captions turned on are not deaf or hard of hearing. One of the reasons for this can be because more and more people are watching social videos in noisy environments or where it is not always possible to turn the sound on. If you add closed captions to your videos this means that your viewers can watch and understand your videos anywhere. Whether on a noisy tube, In the pub, in the library or even in the office whilst working.

Auto-play:

Facebook, Vimeo and other social media platforms often auto-play their videos as soon as the user logs into their accounts. Whilst you get your video viewed quickly, your customer will be missing most of what is happening with no audio. In most cases they will not bother to turn the volume on. This essentially will lead them to watching your video without sound.

Understanding made easier:

Not everyone finds it easy to comprehend video with speech, some people find that reading closed captions makes it much easier to understand the topic.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that YouTube has automated closed captions which are NOT indexed by Google. If you would like all the SEO and keywords for your video you will need to get them produced professionally by a closed captioning and subtitling company.

So, there you have it, the five aspects of why you should be considering adding Closed Captions to your movie. If you would like to learn more about Closed Captioning or are thinking of asking a professional closed captioning company to add them for you, please take a look at our closed caption services page and contact us for a quote today to see what we can offer you.