Closed Captions And Subtitles UX — Smashing Magazine

When we think about closed captioning, we often think about noisy environments, be it busy restaurants, shopping malls, or airport lounges. There, consuming content via audio is difficult, and so captions help communicate information in an alternative, textual way.

This is, of course, useful for video streaming like Netflix or Hulu, but also for games, video courses, social media content, and real-time communication on Zoom, Google Meet, and so on with automated captioning turned on. That way, however, is the only way for some of us who are hard of hearing — temporarily or permanently — nevermind of how noisy or busy the environment is.

In fact, the environment might not matter that much. Many people turn on closed captioning by default these days to comfortably follow along in the video. Perhaps the spoken language isn’t their native language, or perhaps they aren’t quite familiar with the accent of some speakers, or maybe they don’t have headphones nearby, don’t want to use them, or can’t use them. In short, closed captions are better for everybody and they increase ROI and audience.

Just a decade ago, closed captioning would be difficult to come by on the web. Yet, today it’s almost unimaginable to have a public video produced without proper captioning in place. And it doesn’t seem like a...