Captivating Captions: Examples of Captioning and its Uses
Examples of captions doing what they should do
In our recent post Captivating Captions, we looked at why captioning videos is so important for accessibility and many other reasons.
Now we are going to examine some video captions (as opposed to just subtitles) to show what these actually do.
One of the most important roles a caption can play is to fill in context provided by non-verbal sounds in conveying the plot of a film or television program.
Note: each image also has a description underneath it so that users employing screen readers can understand the point of each example. In this situation, every image has the attribute alt=”” because the description is in the image caption instead. Usually though the alt text and the caption provide different functions.
Let’s take a look at the first picture:
Without knowing anything about the story, we can guess that the fact that (as related by the caption) a tire has popped and kids are screaming is probably a significant moment. If captions were not available to a person with deafness/severe hearing loss, then they might not understand why it appears that the children are suddenly screaming. You cannot see either the tire or the children, but the captions let us know what is happening.
The description of music can provide context for a movie or TV show. It can establish the mood of a scene: