Whether you use Rev for captions or write them yourself, closed captions are required for pre-recorded videos. Closed captions have a range of benefits:
- Give people who are deaf or hard of hearing access to videos
- Give people who are in super loud or quiet environments access to videos (e.g., subway train, quiet car, at home with sleeping kiddos)
- Improve SEO ranking and indexing
- Increase user engagement and watch times
To meet this requirement, you can request captions in Chorus Video or upload an SRT file to the project. To make caption files visible for audiences on YouTube or Facebook, you’ll also need to upload them directly to those platforms.
Silent videos or background noise
If the audio track is silent or mostly ambient noise, consider including an inline caption so people understand how the video relates to the story. You can add a caption to the video when embedding it in the story editor.
Third-party videos
Be careful with third-party videos—like movie trailers or music videos—as they may have closed captions disabled. We’re not required to include captions for videos we don’t own, but we should be aware of the impact on audiences.