Video Captions Benefit Everyone

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos
(children, adolescents, college students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document
that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video.
Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for
children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However,
despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many
video audiences and video creators are naïve about the legal mandate to caption, much less the
empirical benefit of captions.