Video marketing platform Wistia released its 2024 State of Video Report in late March. The company touts the report as a tool to “level up your video strategy with all-new insights, video marketing statistics, and industry benchmarks.” According to Wistia, the biggest point is accessibility. The company reported that his 26% of businesses believe that “improving video accessibility is important to the overall viewer experience,” and noted that captions are “leading the way in accessibility.” Wistia reported an astonishing 254% increase in companies using captions in their videos last year compared to his 2022. They attribute part of this stratospheric jump to a mid-year decision to offer automatic transcripts and captions for free.

“Wistia’s mission is to help every business succeed with video,” Wistia co-founder and chief technology officer Brendan Schwartz told me in a video conference interview earlier this month. . “Video should be of maximum benefit to every human being on the planet, regardless of ability. I by no means profess to be an accessibility expert now or during this journey. But , it was driven by customer demand and we have always been a customer-centric organization.”

Schwartz, a 17-year veteran of the company who has focused primarily on product engineering, said he heard a story early in Wistia's life from a customer who was colorblind. Schwartz explained that Wistia has a feature that uses heat maps to help depict which parts of the video a user has watched, but people with color blindness have access to different colors. I pointed out that it couldn't be done. Schwartz called making this accessible an “interesting design challenge” and worked with the customer to make the heat map easier to read. This experience led Schwartz and his team to pull the proverbial punch and dig deeper into accessibility. Wistia started receiving more accessibility requests, including support for captions, from members of the deaf community. Around this time in 2010, Wistia began working with his accessibility company 3Play Media to help people access captions and transcripts with one click. Schwartz said the work happened long before “AI” became a buzzword and represented a “really powerful moment” for Wistia.

Technically speaking, Schwartz said Wistia has come a long way since its early days when it comes to providing high-quality transcripts and captions. As always, the technology that powers them is growing exponentially. That's most noticeable in terms of cost, Schwartz said. Back then, producing text cost “a few dollars a minute,” compared to today, when automatic speech recognition (ASR) was “very good” and could produce transcriptions and captions in large quantities quickly and cheaply. ” cost. Schwartz added that accessibility standards are “rising over time,” with increased awareness of accessibility and more technical standards being established for assistive technologies such as audio descriptions. Although it can still be expensive for small businesses, Schwartz said he's “really excited” that Wistia customers can order video transcripts and captions with the push of a button. Schwartz described it as the “last resort” for any customer to create videos that are fully compliant with his WCAG standards.

In terms of accuracy and sustainability, Schwartz noted that Wistia continues its partnership with the aforementioned 3Play Media in creating “100% human-reviewed” transcripts and captions. Additionally, Wistia works with Deepgram in automatic speech recognition. Schwartz said there is “heavy competition” in the ASR space from “many great vendors” as the profile of artificial intelligence steadily increases, and prices for services are falling accordingly.

Schwartz said accuracy is critical and customers have reported that YouTube captions are substandard in this regard. This was surprising news to him, given the resources Google has available to invest in building more accurate captions. One of the things he has done at Wistia to reduce errors is to provide an easy-to-use transcript editor. This allows users to modify transcripts in an environment that Schwartz likens to his Google Docs or his Microsoft Word. “We want to make it easy for people to fix any problems. [with the transcript],” He said.

In terms of feedback, Schwartz said customers are happy with Vista's accessibility support. One of the reasons for this is that accessibility must be ensured. He said many companies are being required to “adhere to higher accessibility standards.” Additionally, Schwartz said, companies believe that easy access to support is simply the right thing to do from a moral perspective. The more accessible your videos are, the more viewers you can attract. This is because things like captions, as an example, are universally beneficial to everyone, regardless of hearing ability. Schwartz said that if you're a content marketer, accessibility can make the difference between people getting interested in your video and clicking away to do something else.

“A lot of people are watching this [accessibility] It works as a feature to increase engagement with your content and support what you want to do in your business,” Schwartz said. “I think it's wonderful.”

When asked about the future, Schwartz expressed optimism. He believes the capabilities of technology, particularly his advances in AI, will “continue to be a huge boon” to the disability community. For his Wistia in particular, Schwartz said the company's most important goals are to improve accessibility and ease of implementation. What's exciting for him is that he feels he and his team are “not that far” from achieving that goal. Schwartz said there is a lot of competition in Wistia's space, but the increased pressure will ultimately push the company to work harder and develop better products. Accessibility is one area where Wistia stands out in the market and is something Schwartz is very proud of. His long-term vision for Wistia is to continue to innovate with great products and “make things more accessible; [create a] We've created an advanced and better user experience for everyone. ”

Schwartz knows the work is never truly done. Accessibility is always important.

“We can all do better,” he said. “And so will we.”



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