When people struggle to hear, communication becomes challenging and loneliness, sorrow and social isolation can quickly follow. -- Healthy Hearing

Introduction#

Captions (also called “intralingual subtitles”) provide content to people who are Deaf and others who cannot hear the audio. They are also used by people who process written information better than audio.

Captions are a text version of the speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the content. They are displayed within the media player and are synchronized with the audio.

Most are “closed captions” that can be hidden or shown by people watching the video. They can be “open captions” that are always displayed and cannot be turned off.

-- W3C

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults).

More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video.

-- National Library of Medicine

Common Misconceptions#

“All Deaf people can read lips, and as long as I speak distinctly and look at them, they will always understand every word I have to say”.

Actually, lip reading is an amazingly ineffective way of communicating.
It’s estimated that lipreaders can understand only 30% of the conversation taking place.

-- If My Hands Could Speak

Quotes and Statistics from Around the Web#

Within the U.S., 48 million people are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. Globally, there are 466 million people with disabling hearing loss, that’s 6.1% of the world’s population. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that that number could rise to 630 million by 2030, and then to 900 million by 2050.

-- 3PLAYMEDIA

By 2030, the number of people over the age of 65 will be 20% of the population; around 1 in 2 adults over 65 experience hearing loss.

-- 3PLAYMEDIA