How are captions an important tool for accessibility?

• Captions provide essential content and meaning conveyed in audio.
• People who are hard or hearing or deaf use captions to understand meaning being conveyed in audio.
• Captions are also an important tool for people who are learning a language, students who need to take notes on content, and people with learning disabilities.

Bad Example – Embedding Videos that Do Not Have Captions

Pressbooks allows you to easily embed video in your book chapters.

Good Example – Embedding Videos with Captions

When you include videos in your Pressbooks chapters, ensure that the videos you are linking to include captions.  This benefits people with hearing impairments or without access to audio.  Fortunately YouTube provides automatic captions for all videos. We recommend checking to ensure that the captions are accurate. If the YouTube video you are including in your Pressbooks chapter is your own, here are instructions on how to turn on and how to edit captions. Additionally, Microsoft Stream (on Sharepoint) and Zoom both have options for automatic captioning in videos. If you’re using another video tool, search for instructions on captioning or transcribing.

The Pressbooks User Guide (chapter 73) contains more details about embedding videos into your chapters.