The Importance of Subtitles, Captions, and Transcriptions

Captions are generally used to help the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities interact with the world around them. While accessibility is typically the number one reason to provide captions, many studies show that captions, subtitles, and transcriptions are beneficial to everyone. From reading comprehension to language learning skills and content retention, captions are pivotal to improving literacy and learning in students.

Online Courses

Despite the rising popularity of online learning solutions over the last several years, COVID-19 kicked online learning to higher levels than ever before. Current predictions show that the online education market will reach $350 billion by 2025. With this massive influx comes new problems,which include new accessibility issues that can be addressed through quality captions and transcriptions. Some of these considerations include the following:

Compensation for Poor Audio Quality

Recording quality can suffer when producing large amounts of content on a tight timetable, technical issues can arise, and the physical environment can interfere with consuming content from online courses. By including captions, subtitles, or transcriptions, online learning can be much easier to consume and more effective as a teaching tool.

Misunderstanding Due to Strong Accent

With more and more lessons coming from individuals of different nationalities, strong accents produce significant boundaries that subtitles and transcriptions can help alleviate.

Time-Saving

Learners who may need to review the content more than once can more easily and quickly review online courses that include captions and transcriptions.

Physical Accessibility

Hard of hearing or individuals who are deaf can engage more easily with content that provides captions and transcriptions. In fact, many schools may be required by ADA rules to provide accessibility in some form, whether with captions or an ASL signer, if a student requires those tools to succeed.

SEO and Google Results

To attract more potential customers, being found on Google is essential in today's market. Adding subtitles and especially transcriptions can make your search results much easier for Google to 'crawl' or find your content and serve it with appropriate search queries.

eLearning and Formal Education

Not only are online courses booming, but formal education is also being consumed online at an unprecedented rate. With everything from elementary schools to doctoral programs moving to online platforms, the need for clear communication is at an all-time high. One of the first surveys of its type found that 98.6 percent of students who use captions say they are helpful, with 75 percent noting that they use captions as a learning aid.

Compliance standards

Formal education is held to strict standards for accessibility through the ADA. Subtitles and transcriptions can be essential steps toward compliance and avoiding potential fees and fines.

Learning mix

As has become common knowledge, people learn best in a variety of formats and absorption methods. By incorporating a secondary way of absorbing the knowledge, formal eLearning platforms and courses benefit from providing subtitles and transcriptions.

Learning Retention

Subtitles have been proven to help improve learning retention, which is especially important in online learning formats.

Attention and Focus

In-person lessons are typically more engaging and easier to focus on than eLearning sources. Giving students a live read-out of what they are hearing gives one more opportunity for them to focus on a visual element. This can be extremely important when considering students who may be neurodivergent.

How Link Electronics Can Help

At Link Electronics, we are eager to help you reach your goals related to captioning. We have worked with schools and universities nationwide to provide captioning for classrooms and online learning. For more than 30 years, our company has provided quality products at competitive prices, alongside excellent service. Let us know how we can help.