This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung
Accessibility
Why do videos on the website need captions?
Videos need captions because deaf and hard-of-hearing people can't hear the audio — and because many visitors play videos muted anyway, on the train, say. Captions display everything spoken and important sounds as text on screen. The rule applies to all recorded videos with sound on your website.
Captions reach more visitors than the audio does
A brand film on your homepage tells the story of what your company stands for in ninety seconds. Without captions, that message passes by anyone who can't hear the sound, or doesn't want to right now — and there are many of those: visitors in a waiting room, in an open-plan office, in the evening next to a sleeping child. Captions render not just the speech, but also meaningful sounds, such as "(phone ringing)". There's an important difference from mere translation: accessibility captions also name who's speaking when that isn't visible. Platforms like YouTube generate automatic captions — usable as a rough draft, but they absolutely must be corrected before publishing.
How our measurement engine checks captions
Our automated check looks more closely than usual: it looks for a caption track on every video on the page, actually downloads the corresponding caption file, and checks whether it contains real text entries with timestamps. An empty file, or one that's only formally linked, therefore doesn't pass — the mere existence of a caption reference isn't evidence for us. Only if every video file found has a loaded, filled caption track does the criterion count as passed. With embedded third-party players — a YouTube window, say — the automation can't see inside the player; then the report marks the criterion as "manual review", and at the Gold Standard level a human checks.
Examples
Video with sound
<video controls src="anleitung.mp4"></video><video controls src="anleitung.mp4">
<track kind="captions" srclang="de" label="Deutsch" src="anleitung.de.vtt" default>
</video>The VTT file carries the spoken text with time stamps and important sounds in square brackets.
- Play every video on your website muted once — do you fully understand the content through the captions?
- Correct automatically generated captions before the video goes live — names and technical terms are often wrong there.
- Ask your video production team to supply captions as a separate track, not burned into the picture.
- Add meaningful sounds in brackets in the captions, such as "(applause)".
- For embedded YouTube videos, check whether captions can be turned on in the player.
