Rich media and captions

Captions and subtitles

This guidance relates to captions. In the UK, captions and subtitles are not the same thing. It’s important to know the difference:

• Captions help people understand a video when they can’t hear properly. They present the spoken dialogue and important sound effects of the video as text. The text is synchronized with the soundtrack, so as someone starts to speak, their words are shown (usually at the bottom of the screen) at the same time.
• Subtitles translate a video’s spoken dialogue into another language.

Rules around captions

• If the video has spoken dialogue and/or important sound effects, it must have captions.
• There should be a button within the media player that turns captions on/off. On YouTube for example, the is the white square button with little black dots.
• The captions must be displayed in a text size that’s comfortable to read.

Creating captions on YouTube

The easiest way to create captions is to create a transcript of the spoken dialogue, then upload it with the video on YouTube. YouTube will automatically synchronise the transcript with the video and generate the captions for you when you upload it.

A transcript example

A transcript is a text file that contains only the words and sounds of the video. A common convention for a transcript is:

>> NAME: Indicates a change of speaker.
[sound] indicates an important sound effect.

For example:

>> ALICE: Would you like a cup of tea?
>> BOB: Yes please
[rain against the window]
It’s raining.
>>ALICE: It’s always raining.
Here’s your tea.