Deaf Awareness Week 2026

All posts in Guides, 4 min read, 7th May 2026
Kate Jones
Kate Jones
Tips and resources for adding captions and transcripts to video content.

Providing captions and transcripts for your video content will make a big difference to people who are deaf or have hearing loss.

In the UK today, hearing loss is far more common than many people realise. According to RNID, 18 million people in the UK are deaf, have hearing loss or tinnitus, which equates to about one in three adults.

Hearing loss becomes more common with age, affecting over half of people aged 55+ and the vast majority of those over 70.

For Deaf Awareness Week (4–10th May), we’ve written a short guide to presenting pre-recorded videos on your website and the accessible alternatives needed to help everyone engage with your content.

Captions

Captions make video content accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Captions also benefit far more people than those with hearing loss. They can be helpful in noisy environments (bars, restaurants, airports) where conversations compete with background chatter, announcements, and music. And for people who prefer to watch videos with the sound off.

An easy way to create captions for a video is to upload it to YouTube and use its automatic captioning tool. But you must edit for accuracy.

AI-generated captions have improved significantly in recent years and are a useful starting point, but they are still not reliable enough on their own. They will require human review to correct issues such as misheard words, a lack of punctuation and capitalisation. You can manually edit YouTube captions if needed.

If there’s no speech in your video, consider providing a line of text before the video to let users know that captions are not needed, e.g. Captions not needed: the only sound in this video is background music.

Transcripts

There are two types of transcripts: basic and descriptive. Basic transcripts provide a text version of audio dialogue and any non-speech audio content. Descriptive transcripts also provide a text description of any on-screen visuals in the video content. This can be helpful for capturing, for example, information presented on slide decks in conference talks.

The most accessible format for a transcript is text on a web page. For a descriptive transcript, you may choose to format it as a table, with the audio transcribed in one column and the description of key visual details in another column. Here’s a video and descriptive transcript of a conference talk from one of the Studio 24 developers.

By their nature, transcripts are helpful for everybody. People may want to skim the transcript to decide whether to play a media file, especially if they are trying to save data and/or power on a mobile device.

You may choose to pay for a professional transcription service, but if you are keen to do it yourself, the Web Accessibility Initiative offers detailed guidance on how to transcribe audio to text.

Planning your video

Captions should not be an afterthought; they influence how a video is produced.

Modern devices, i.e. smartphones, tablets, TVs, display content in different formats. Designing with captions in mind ensures content remains usable across all devices.

When framing and composing video:

  • Keep important content within safe zones. Captions can be obstructed by progress bars or share buttons.
  • Allow space for captions – leave an uncluttered area in the lower third of the frame
  • Consider how videos will be cropped across different screen sizes and aspect ratios

Also, have a look at the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) advice on planning audio and video media. Planning ahead of recording will save both time and money in the long run.

According to the latest Ofcom Online Nations report, the vast majority of UK adults use YouTube – spending an average of 51 minutes a day on it. If you want your video content to be seen, it must be made accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and everyone else.

Resources