Hearing Loss Isn’t the Only Reason for Closed Captioning and Subtitles
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The World Health Organization estimates there are 360 million people worldwide who suffer from disabling hearing loss. That’s more than five percent of the world population, and about 42 million more people than the entire U.S. population as estimated by the census bureau in 2014. It may be true that a significant portion of those people live in underdeveloped parts of the world where video content is not the everyday occurrence that it is for those of us who live in the U.S. And if you’re producing video content of any kind, you may find it easy to slip into thinking that the content you produce should be designed for your specific audience, which has a statistically low percentage of deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
With that idea in mind, you may conclude that laws requiring closed captioning and audio description simply add to your expenses while benefiting relatively few people. However, captioning isn’t useful to only the hearing impaired. In fact, a study conducted in the U.K. and reported by the BBC found that 80 percent of people who used closed captions (often referred to as ‘TV [...]