Video has become a powerful medium for communication, entertainment, and education, but not everyone can fully access video content. Video captions, also known as subtitles, are essential for ensuring that the content of a video is accessible to a wider audience, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, non-native speakers, and people in noisy environments. In addition to improving accessibility, video captions can also enhance user engagement and improve search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, we will explore the importance of video captions in more detail, including why they are necessary for accessibility, how they can improve user engagement, and how they can benefit SEO.
Why are Captions In Videos Important?
Here are the reasons for listing the importance of video captions.
- Improves accessibility to hearing-impaired users: Captions make the information you are trying to convey easier to get through to the user. They make it easier for hearing-impaired users to understand the context of your video without needing to increase the volume beyond recommended levels which may cause more damage and be of nuisance to others.
- Convenient to use in noisy places: Videos are easily accessible at the moment. With the introduction of cheaper data packs, people can access the internet through their smart devices such as mobile phones granting them access to video content in public places. Having captions is very convenient to use in noisier places since you don’t have to strain your ears trying to listen to a video instead, you can focus on the captions.
- Easier to load: Captions increase video views by up to 40% and the chances that your video will be watched in its entirety increase by 80%. The benefits heavily outweigh the efforts put into getting captions because they are even easier to load since they don’t use up much data especially compared to the video itself.
- Easier to go back to for reference: Video captions are easier to get back to for any references you may need. Since the caption is basically a transcript of the audio in text format, when you have to refer to certain information provided in the video, you don’t have to search the video or watch it for its entirety. Instead, you can just scan through the captions to find out what you were looking for easily.
- Improves effective communication: Video captions improve communications in a vast number of ways. They make it easier for people who are not native speakers of the language to communicate and even break down language barriers. And help viewers who can’t comprehend what the audio is trying to convey.
How To Generate Captions For Your Video & Use the Summarise in Flonnect?
Don’t need to fret, you can easily generate captions for your video with the transcript feature in Flonnect. Here’s how.
- After using Flonnect to record your screen, head to Flonnect’s Dashboard by clicking on the icon on the top right corner and choosing ‘Dashboard’ in the Flonnect dialogue box.
- In the Dashboard Library, from the list of videos you have recorded, select the video that you want to generate captions.
- Click on the ‘Generate Transcript’ button at the bottom right-hand side of the screen to get captions for your video.
FAQs
Video captions provide a text-based representation of the audio content in a video, making it possible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to follow along. Without captions, these viewers may miss out on important information, dialogue, or sound effects. Captions also make video content more accessible to non-native speakers or those with language barriers.
Video captions can improve user engagement by making it easier for viewers to understand and retain information. Captions can help viewers to follow the narrative of a video more closely, even in noisy environments or situations where audio playback is not possible. Captions can also be used to highlight key points or provide additional context for visual elements in the video.
Video captions can benefit SEO by providing additional metadata for search engines to index. Captions can contain important keywords and phrases that describe the content of the video, making it easier for search engines to understand and categorize the content. Captions can also improve user engagement, which can in turn improve search engine rankings.