Are You Providing Captions For Corporate Events?
Beginner’s Guide to Captioning [Free eBook]
Do you have a live corporate event coming up? Will your videos be captioned?
Captions for virtual and hybrid corporate events benefit your company and your audience. Today, videos are used for several types of corporate events, such as conferences, meetings, and webinars. Presenters at conferences may use videos to help reinforce their message or to communicate their message to the audience better, and companies may record conference presentations to use for future content. In a workplace meeting, a handful of attendees may call in via video chat. A company may hold a conference or webinar online and use live video to display a presentation for all to view.
In this post, we’ll discuss why captions for virtual and hybrid events are a great way to make your videos accessible, boost SEO, encourage engagement, and reach a global audience. Additionally, we’ll go over what to look for in a captioning vendor for corporate events and some of the challenges that can arise.
The Benefits of Captions for Virtual Events
By including captions for virtual events, companies can reap several benefits. Notably, companies can improve accessibility, search engine optimization, engagement and focus, and opportunities for translation.
Accessibility
Without captions, videos for corporate events, live or prerecorded, are not accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions for virtual events also make content more accessible to learners of English as a second language and assist those with learning disabilities and neurological disorders.
If your company conducts a live event, such as a virtual or hybrid conference, it may be difficult, if not impossible, for someone with a disability to follow along without live captions. Using a high-quality live captioning service will ensure that the presentations are accessible to all.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is essential to help your content rank higher in search engines and drive more traffic to your website. With videos, however, SEO gets a little more tricky since search engine bots can’t watch videos. They can index text, though. That’s where captions come in.
Captions provide a text version of your video so search engine bots can crawl and adequately index the video content. Let’s say you’ve recorded valuable and informative conference presentations and those recordings now live on your website for the public to view. With captions, those video recordings will rise in search engine ranks, receive more views, and bring in more organic traffic to your site.
Engagement and Focus
For many of us, information tends to go in one ear and out the other. Fortunately, there are ways to combat our short attention spans and keep our focus.
A study by the University of Iowa found that people retain information better after seeing and hearing it. Sometimes just hearing words isn’t enough for people. This makes sense since other research suggests that humans have a superior visual memory. Because captions are a visual medium, they’re able to provide the visual elements needed to improve the retention of information.
In corporate meetings, companies want attendees to focus on and retain the information they’ve heard. Be sure to caption videos used in meetings, or any corporate event, to engage the audience better and improve their focus and comprehension.
Translations
For many businesses, it may be that people from all over the world are attending your conference or tuning in to your webinars. For this reason, translations are essential.
The great thing is that, with captions, it’s much easier to translate content into other languages. It’s just a few easy steps to translate captions on YouTube. Otherwise, there’s the option of utilizing a third-party vendor to translate your video content.
Providing content for those who only speak the original language of the video content limits the potential of your reach. Using translations will broaden your content’s reach and include people who speak other languages.
Getting started with media accessibility? Check out our Beginner’s Guide to Captioning ➡️
What Challenges Arise with Captioning Corporate Event Videos?
Once an organization realizes the benefits of captions for its corporate event videos and decides to move forward with captioning, it’s time to search for a captioning solution. Settling on a captioning solution isn’t always easy, though, and organizations must think about challenges such as staying within budget and ease of captioning workflow when selecting a captioning vendor.
Cost
Accurate, high-quality captions are great for accessibility and engagement, but at what cost? Organizations often have a captioning budget they must abide by, and because of that, they must look for captioning solutions that deliver accurate captions at an affordable cost. Finding a budget-friendly solution can prove to be a challenge, but it is possible to find a vendor that strikes a balance between reasonable costs and a quality captioning service.
Workflow
Where are these corporate events taking place, and where are these many corporate event videos being hosted? The answer may differ from one organization to the other, and therefore, the captioning process would be different. The difficulty lies in finding a vendor that caters to each company’s specific captioning needs. Does the captioning vendor provide integrations for online video platforms? How many caption file formats does the vendor offer? Does the vendor give its customers the independence to manage video files and assign user permissions? Every organization requires its own unique captioning workflow and must find a captioning vendor that is willing to work together to create an experience that is both seamless and painless.
Which Caption Vendor Features Are Best for Corporate Event Videos?
There’s much to consider when seeking live captioning solutions for corporate event videos. To make captioning a smoother process for your organization, look for vendors which provide the following features and solutions:
Account Management
If you’re captioning corporate event videos, look for a vendor with a user interface that’s easy to use. Your user account should make organizing and managing videos and caption files a breeze so that you can focus on creating more great content. It’s also critical that the vendor you choose offers substantial support documentation and access to a support team just in case of any unexpected hurdles.
Caption Quality
Captions are, first and foremost, used to make video accessible, and for video content to be truly accessible, captions must be accurate. Providing accurate captions also creates a better viewing experience for other caption users. Research shows that 80% of people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing but use captions because they improve the viewing experience. For the sake of accessibility and user experience, captions for corporate event videos should have as few errors as possible.
Remember: Captions benefit everyone, but only when they’re not riddled with errors. Without caption accuracy, your corporate event videos won’t be accessible, and they’ll be less likely to keep your audience engaged. Be on the lookout for a vendor that guarantees at least 99% caption accuracy on all files.
Integrations
Almost everyone is looking for ways to save time, and it’s no different for captioning corporate event videos. Video platform integrations make captioning quick, and in some cases, you don’t even need to log into your user account to get the captions you need. Vendors that can integrate with a variety of online video platforms help to make captioning a more efficient process.
Competitive Pricing
Finding a captioning solution that is budget-friendly is a priority for many organizations, including those producing corporate event videos. It may seem that quality captions are hard to come by at a reasonable price, but some vendors utilize both technology and quality assurance measures to keep costs competitive. To stay within budget without sacrificing accessibility, look for vendors that prioritize caption accuracy and offer prices that won’t break the bank.
Upgrade Paths for Additional Services
As imperative as live captioning is, it’s only a piece of the video captioning and accessibility puzzle. As you create more video content, your live audio captioning vendor would ideally be able to support you in those realms and more. Talk to your potential vendor about these options and see if the company meets your needs:
- Captioning for prerecorded videos
- Transcription services
- Audio description
- Translation and subtitling services
Ready to Offer Captions for Virtual Events?
Accessibility, search engine optimization, user engagement, and global reach are just some of the reasons why captions for corporate virtual events are beneficial. Who’s to say what other positive changes captions can bring to your company?
This blog was originally published by Jaclyn Leduc in May 2019 and has since been updated for accuracy, clarity, and comprehensiveness.
