Caption Accessibility Basics for Everyday Videos

Captions serve viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, people watching with the sound off and anyone following along in a second language. Accessible captions come down to a short list of basics, and DepCut puts each one within reach.

Caption every spoken line

Run Generate subtitles on the finished cut. Then open Options in the Subtitles panel and confirm that Show subtitles is on. That one switch controls the captions in the preview, on the timeline and in the export.

DepCut burns captions into the exported video, so every viewer sees them and nobody can switch them off. Choose a style you are happy to have on screen for the whole video.

Make them readable

• Contrast. Clean, Curiosity hook, Typewriter, Block, Highlighter and Bubblegum put a plate behind the text. Big & punchy, Minimal, Editorial and Neon rely on a shadow, which suits calm footage and needs a check over bright shots.
• Size. Use the Size slider in Options and test at the size a viewer will see. Each line should be readable at a glance.
• Font. Pick a clear face in a medium or bold weight. Ornate and thin faces are harder to read at speed.
• Placement. Captions should never cover a face, on-screen text or the object a viewer needs to see. Drag the caption on the video to a better spot. The position applies to the whole subtitle track, and Reset beside Position in Options returns it to the style's default.

Get the words and the timing right

Generated captions come from a speech transcriber, so read them. Names, numbers, acronyms and technical terms are the usual misses. Fix them in the Content tab, where you can click any caption and type. Spell terms the same way each time they appear.

A caption should appear with its speech and stay long enough to read. Play the video and watch for a caption that vanishes before you finish it. On the timeline, drag the right edge of its bar to hold it longer when there is room before the next caption. Keep captions to short phrases that fit on one or two lines, and split a long one with Enter in the Content tab.

Generated captions hold spoken words only. If a sound carries meaning, such as an alarm the speaker reacts to, make sure the picture or a caption conveys it. You can edit the text of a nearby caption in the Content tab and add a short label in square brackets. When several people speak, a name at the start of a line tells viewers who is talking.

Offer another language

Ask the Agent for subtitles in a second language, and DepCut adds a track translated line by line with the timing kept. Each track appears as its own line on the video, and the eye toggle titled Hide track on the timeline lets you export one language at a time. Proofread the original captions first, because the translation follows them.

Run the checklist

Take your latest finished cut into DepCut, generate subtitles and go down this list before you export.