A Human Approach to Captions

Captions and transcripts are powerful tools for both accessibility and searchability. In recent years, the technologies for creating captions and transcripts – especially those incorporating AI – have improved drastically, requiring less human intervention than ever before. Despite this, high-quality captions and transcripts do not simply appear at the press of a button. No matter what technology you use, creating captions and transcripts requires human intervention in order for them to be accurate, searchable, and, most importantly, accessible.

This presentation will take you through the process of creating captions and transcripts for digitized audiovisual materials, from selecting a captioning software and learning what makes a good caption, to creating a standardized captioning and transcription workflow and integrating it into the digital preservation cycle. The result is an audiovisual collection that is not only accessible but also fully searchable, giving users the option to experience your collection in multiple modalities and extract audio, visual, and textual data, opening up new possibilities for how your content can be used for research.

Presented at Best Practices Exchange on June 10th, 2025.