Why captions and subtitles matter
Captions and subtitles are often used interchangeably, but they serve different purposes in enhancing video accessibility, engagement, and comprehension. Whether you're watching a video in a noisy environment, learning a new language, or catering to viewers with hearing impairments, adding high-quality captions or subtitles ensures better audience reach and engagement.
Research shows that captioning a video improves comprehension, attention, and memory retention (Gernsbacher, 2015). With over 80% of social media videos being watched on mute, ensuring your video content is accessible through text overlays is crucial for global reach and inclusivity.
What are captions and subtitles?
At their core, both captions and subtitles are text transcriptions of video or audio recordings. However, they serve different audiences and have distinct features.
Similarities:
Both provide a text file with time-coded synchronization to the video, most commonly in SRT format.
Both display spoken dialogue and can be used for localization (translation) into different languages.
Captions and subtitles share some undeniable differences. Captions are primarily for accessibility, including audio descriptions for the hearing impaired, while subtitles are designed for language translation for viewers who can hear the audio but need a different language. Captions include dialogue, sound effects, speaker identification, and background noises, whereas subtitles only transcribe spoken dialogue. Captions can be toggled on or burned into the video, while subtitles are usually toggled on and off. Finally, captions are mainly in the same language as the original content, while subtitles are often translated into multiple languages.
