4 posts tagged with "Caption Accuracy"

A question we hear constantly from organizations managing large video libraries: "We need a way to measure the accuracy and consistency of captions across our library of training videos. They've been created by folks across the organization, so quality varies. Does anyone use a tool for this?"

The short answer: yes, and Recap has it built in. Here's how Word Error Rate tooling works and why it matters when caption quality varies across your team.

Caption timing is one of the most tedious parts of post-production accessibility work. Editors typically guess at timestamps, play back repeatedly, and manually type corrections measured in milliseconds. Recap's new waveform timestamp editor changes that workflow entirely by making audio visible directly within the caption editor.

Speech-to-text alone does not produce professional captions. When a video shows a door slam, a siren in the distance, or background music that sets the tone, viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing miss that information unless captions describe it. Professional captioning standards treat these descriptive sound cues as essential, not optional.

Recap now adds descriptive sound cues automatically during transcription. When you upload a video or re-transcribe an existing file, you can turn this on with a single checkbox (on by default). The result is bracketed, lowercased sound descriptions inline in your captions, editable in the transcript editor, and exported in every caption format you publish.

Procurement officers and accessibility coordinators evaluating captioning vendors often see claims of "99% accuracy" or "WER under 1%." But caption quality involves more than word-level accuracy. Formatted Error Rate (FER) and Word Error Rate (WER) measure different aspects of caption quality. Understanding both metrics helps you specify the right quality requirements in RFPs and evaluate vendor performance. This guide explains the technical definitions, when each metric applies, and what to request from vendors.