4 Reasons Why You Need to Care About Closed Captions

When you’re wrapping up production on movies or television shows, there are a million things on your schedule you need to get done. Final decisions, payroll, advertising options, maybe even last-minute rewrites and shoots. The last thing you may want to be thinking about is getting your work closed captioned.

However, we’ve got four good reasons why closed captioning should be one of your top priorities during post-production:

1. It’s simply the polite thing to do.

When you add closed captioning to your TV series or movie, you’re indicating that you respect the 17% of Americans who claim to have some form of hearing loss. Generally, you don’t think about a problem unless it directly affects you; however, if you stopped to think about how frustrating it’d be hard of hearing and not be able to watch a show or film because of a lack of closed captioning, you’d begin to understand how the deaf have to live every day. Including closed captioning shows you acknowledge their needs.

2. It reaches a broader audience.

If you need a slightly more business like reason, this one’s easy. You’ll reach more people and have a wider audience if you include closed captioning for your production. Remember that 17% of Americans we mentioned above who are hard of hearing? That’s a group you wouldn’t be able to reach if you didn’t include closed captions.

3. It keeps things out of the legal system.

Closed captioning is a legal requirement you really can’t overlook. Companies get sued over a lack of closed captioning all the time, even in the most recent years. Don’t believe us? Check out these stories:

– “Hearing-Impaired Fans Sue for Access to Closed-Captioning”
– “Closed captioning lawsuit: Netflix faces legal charges for not complying with ADA requirements”

Need we say more?

4. It isn’t that complicated.

You may not have anyone in-house who can do your own closed captioning, or you may be getting very close to your deadlines and simply don’t have the time. But getting closed captioning for your production doesn’t have to be a hassle, even when you’re that busy. It’s quite easy to get your closed captions completed by an outside company like Speechpad. You simply send in the required parts, and leave the rest up to the experts in closed captioning, while you can keep your focus on what you do best.

In general, closed captioning is always a good idea even if it takes a little extra time and resources to include it in your production. You won’t regret it when you get a grateful email or letter from a hard of hearing viewer.