accessibility glossary

Closed Captions

Closed captions are synchronized on-screen text for a video's spoken dialogue and important sounds, letting deaf and hard-of-hearing users, and anyone watching without sound, follow along.

Unlike open captions, which are permanently burned into the video image, closed captions can typically be toggled on or off by the viewer and are provided as a separate text track. Good captions include not just dialogue but relevant non-speech audio information, like [phone ringing] or [tense music], since that context matters to understanding the video.

WCAG success criterion 1.2.2 requires captions for prerecorded video with audio at Level A, and auto-generated captions, while a useful starting point, frequently contain errors serious enough that they should be reviewed and corrected before publishing, not relied on as-is.

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