The chapter turns outward now, from looking after yourself to looking after the people on the other side of the screen, and it starts with accessibility. Captioning is the first piece because it is the clearest case of something that is both right and smart at once. Captioning your content makes it available to people who cannot hear it, which is a matter of basic access, and it also happens to widen your audience, hold attention longer, and make your work easier to find. You almost never have to choose between doing right by your audience and doing well, and captioning is the cleanest example of that.
The accessibility reason comes first and stands on its own. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people make up a real share of any audience, and uncaptioned content simply shuts them out, a gap that adult content is especially bad about closing. Captioning lets them in. The reason it also helps your numbers is that most people, hearing or not, watch with the sound off a great deal of the time, on muted autoplay, in public, in bed next to someone asleep. On the social platforms that feed your funnel, silent autoplay is the default state, so a video that lands its meaning without sound gets watched through while one that needs audio gets scrolled past. Captions also give the platforms and search engines text to index, the same discoverability point the SEO articles made, so captioned content is easier to find as well as easier to watch.
There are two kinds of captions, and the difference is practical. Open captions, also called burned-in or hardcoded, are part of the video image itself, always visible and impossible to turn off, and they work on any platform because they need no support from it. Closed captions live in a separate file, usually an SRT or VTT, that the viewer can toggle and the platform displays, which gives users control and hands the platform clean text but only works where caption files are supported. For most short-form and social content, burned-in captions are the practical choice, since mobile viewers will not dig through settings and many platforms do not take caption files at all. Where closed captions are supported, on a site like YouTube, uploading an SRT is worth doing, and doing both, burned-in for portability and a caption file where it is accepted, covers every case.
The work is far easier than it used to be, because the tools auto-generate captions from your audio. The platforms offer it free, and dedicated apps add burned-in styling and more control, many with free tiers, so generating a first pass costs you almost nothing. The catch is accuracy. Auto-captioning is good in clean conditions and noticeably worse with background noise, accents, fast or breathy speech, names, slang, and the non-standard vocabulary this kind of content is full of. It is easy to see where it slips: a name comes out as a random common word, a breathy or moaned line becomes a string of nonsense, a piece of kink vocabulary gets autocorrected into something unrelated, and the result reads as gibberish to the person who actually depends on it. Raw auto-captions are a draft rather than a finished job, so review and fix them before you publish, because captions riddled with errors are barely more accessible than none and look careless besides.
Real accessibility covers more than the words. Meaningful sounds are part of the experience, so noting them in brackets where they matter, the way captioners mark things like music or laughter, conveys what a hearing viewer gets from the audio and a deaf viewer would otherwise miss. For this kind of content that judgment is yours to make, but the principle is to caption the experience and not only the dialogue, so that what reaches a deaf viewer is as close as you can make it to what reaches everyone else.
If you make audio content, captioning takes the form of a transcript, and it matters even more there. Audio work, the kind with no video to carry it, is completely closed to deaf people without a text version, so providing a transcript is the whole of their access to it. Treat the transcript as part of the product rather than an extra, written out fully so the piece can be read by someone who cannot hear a second of it.
A few craft points make captions actually usable. Keep them legible, with enough contrast and size to read easily, positioned so they do not cover the action, and timed to stay on screen long enough to read without racing ahead of or lagging behind the audio. Two short lines on screen at a time usually read more easily than one long one. And build captioning into your production process rather than bolting it on later, generating and correcting captions as part of finishing a piece, and keeping the caption files with the content in your library so they travel with it everywhere it goes and are ready to re-upload whenever you move a piece to a new platform.
Captioning is the plainest case of accessibility paying for itself, opening your work to people who were shut out of it and to everyone watching on mute, at very little cost to you. The same instinct, treating your audience as people you owe some care, runs through the rest of this chapter. Captioning helps the people who cannot hear your content. A different kind of care is warning the people for whom certain content could be harmful or distressing, from flashing lights to intense material, so they can choose what they take in. That is the next article, on content and sensory warnings.