You might think subtitles and captions are compartmentalized in one or two business niches like foreign films and TV shows watched by people with hearing loss. But there are many places captions and subtitles are needed, and if you produce any of the following, you need to have them edited properly for consistency, correctness, and clarity if you want your target audience to benefit from them.
Before you scroll away because you "don’t know any deaf people," consider this: you may think you don't, but a lot of people don't advertise their deafness because a) it doesn't define them, and b) it's frustrating to keep explaining it over and over to hearing people.
Here are some examples of products and users for where there's a need for a final edit for audience immersion and comprehension:
- hearing and deaf friends who want to see a movie together
- English language learners
- people needing cognitive support with visual reinforcement cues
- shows with heavily accented or audio-obscured speakers
- folks in noisy or quiet places or where the volume is off or problematic
- company profile videos
- corporate promos and demos
- automatically craptioned YouTube videos
- educational and training videos
- supertitles for live performances, such as opera or bilingual theatre
- projection of lyrics for sing-along events, movies or congregational worship
- TV pitches and pilots
- conference recordings
- DIY videos
- online tutorials
- captioned programming requiring localization (i.e. using the correct conventions for another country's standard English)
- presentations and pre-written talks
- institutional video archives
- reported speech on TV shows (e.g. quoting a speaker on a news report)
- museum or art exhibits
- retrofitting outdated visual materials (especially in light of new legislation in many areas which directs content to be fully accessible)
The beauty of subtitle editing is that you aren't adding a large expense to your budget: the larger outlay is already done (translation and/or transcription), so you're only paying for an edit of your current product, which will be recouped by higher sales from satisfied customers and, by extension, word of mouth. It's an affordable add-on that increases product value, adheres to accessibility rights, and gives you an edge over competitors. You stand to win when others in the marketplace are generating social media memes for their uncaught errors in the current grammar-vigilante atmosphere. It's not true that the public doesn't care about spelling and grammar: they judge reliability and credibility by professionally presented products and copy and, if they're comparison shopping, they're bound to choose the company that communicates flawlessly.