The photo above shows a stack of notebooks with handwritten notes, a pen, a cassette tape, and a tape recorder. Yes, the things from the 20th century. Why am I sharing this photo?
While it’s great that more people are interested in captions and transcripts, they often ask me if auto captions or ASR (automated speech recognition) are a great accessibility solution. I would say no it’s not the best practice, especially for professional content. But it also depends.
There are many videos online that either don’t have captions or have auto captions. Auto captions are not of acceptable quality. Bad captions are not better than no captions. Machine generated captions fail to meet many good quality captioning guidelines. It’s like reading a book that is not edited and includes a lot of grammatical mistakes – which makes it hard to enjoy the book. Low quality captions are like a poorly written book.