June is Effective Communications Month, highlighting the importance of using successful communication skills to enhance personal and professional interactions.
Even in the best of circumstances, effective communication can be difficult, and the move to more remote interactions – email, texts, and video conferences rather than in-person social activity, conversations, and meetings – over the past 12-plus months has brought additional challenges.
Regardless of whether you’re communicating with coworkers and colleagues or friends and family, it’s especially important that everyone is included in the conversation.
For more than 30 years, VITAC’s captions and accessibility offerings have been making communication more effective and inclusive.
Captions
In addition to making content accessible to members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, captions have been shown to improve listener comprehension, engagement, and retention for all and not just those requiring accessible content.
Captions also are beneficial to English Language Learners, or students who are learning the English language in addition to their native language or any other languages they may speak. They can help students focus, can clarify a video or presentation’s muffled or distorted audio, and can help viewers better understand tricky technical terms and jargon.
Captions also can bring an increased level of accessibility to remote meetings and online conferences. Our conferencing and video streaming integration platforms include caption solutions for Zoom Video Communications, Cisco Webex, ON24, Digitell, and Adobe Connect.
Social Media
Captioning your social media content not only enables you to communicate with a larger, more inclusive audience, but it also helps make your videos more engaging. But just as each social media platform has its own unique way to post content, they also differ in the ways captions can be integrated.
Most platforms offer options for users to add their own captions. In some cases, this can be relatively simple, but most times it can be a time-consuming and tricky process. This is especially true with longer videos, music clips, or videos that feature multiple speakers and quick, back-and-forth discussions.
At VITAC, we can help you save time and aggravation, while providing assurance that your social posts are accurate and inclusive.
Audio Description
Much in the same way that captions provide a visual way for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to experience sound, audio description provides an audio means for people who are blind or with low vison to experience video.
Our audio description professionals insert audio-narrated descriptions of a video’s key visual elements, such as onscreen actions, characters, costumes, and text appearing in graphics in the video, into natural pauses between the program’s dialogue.
How VITAC Can Help
We pride ourselves on providing the highest quality captions and audio description services. Our professionals are here to help you every step of the way, and will work with you to make sure that you’re effectively communicating with your entire audience.