The argument

Captions are not enough.

Signed: International Sign — pending Captions: with every video How this page is tested

Legally compliant. Still not understood. Here is why — with receipts.

Start with the evidence Audio description

This argument, signed

The whole page signed by a Deaf creator. International Sign for the global site; your national sign language on your country page. Signed by a Deaf creator, credited by name.

International Sign Captions + transcript ship with the video. Read this instead

Three gaps

Why captions fail most Deaf viewers

Not a question of ability. A first language that is signed, not written — and a world that never taught the written one.

In plain words

Three things stack up. Most Deaf people never went to school. The ones who did were taught in a language they cannot hear. And captions move faster than anyone can read. Put together, captions alone leave most Deaf people out.

Up to ~90%

The World Federation of the Deaf estimates that as much as 90% of the world's Deaf children and adults have never been to school. Its 93-country survey found that only 23 countries provide bilingual education in sign language and the national language, and then only in some schools.

Receipt: Haualand & Allen, Deaf People and Human Rights, WFD (2009)

1. The schooling gap

Reading fluency is made in school. Most of the world's Deaf people never got that school — and where school existed, it was rarely taught in a sign language.

Framing rule we hold ourselves to: the issue is a first language that is signed, not written. Not a label.

About 4th grade

In the United States, across three decades of national testing, the median reading score of deaf and hard-of-hearing students never rose above a fourth-grade level.

Receipt: Qi & Mitchell, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 17(1) (2012); Traxler (2000)

2. The reading gap

Even in the best-resourced deaf-education system on earth, the median school-leaver reads at about a fourth-grade level. Captions are written for adults.

140–230 words a minute

Captions run at 140–230 words per minute; median Deaf comprehension is around 100–140 — and comprehension falls as caption rate rises.

Receipt: Jensema 1998; Burnham 2008; Tyler 2009

3. The speed gap

Captions outrun comprehension. They arrive in fragments, with no rewind, while the picture keeps moving. The faster they go, the less gets through.

The doctrinal point

Audits test the file, not the viewer.

In plain words

Accessibility rules check whether captions exist. They do not check whether a Deaf person understood. So a service can pass every test and still fail most Deaf viewers.

The standards behind accessibility law check the artifact: is there a caption track, is it synchronized. They do not check the reader. Sign language sits at the highest, optional level — and no law in the European chain requires it.

The European Union's own Deaf federation says written text alone is not sufficient for most deaf sign language users. We agree, and we show our receipts.

The European Accessibility Act has been in force since June 2025.

Receipt: EU Directive 2019/882

About 70 million Deaf people worldwide use a sign language as their first or preferred language.

Receipt: World Federation of the Deaf

The conclusion

Necessary. Not sufficient.

Captions are necessary. They are not sufficient. We deliver the modality that reaches everyone.

How delivery works Talk to us

The same logic, for sight

Audio description: a checkbox or the story?

In plain words

Blind and low-vision people face the same problem from the other side. A video can have a short, rushed audio description that ticks the box and still misses the story. Good description carries the story.

Compliance asks: is there an audio description track? Comprehension asks: did the description carry what the picture was saying? The gap is the same gap.

Audio description on is made by people, who are paid for it, and delivered the same way as sign language: in sync, over the content you already have.

Audio description demo 25 s Captions: auto-generated, human pending Transcript: pending Sign language: pending

~1 billion

About 1 billion people live with vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.

Receipt: WHO World Report on Vision

430 million

430 million people live with disabling hearing loss — projected to reach 700 million by 2050.

Receipt: WHO

Two communities, two numbers. We never add them into one.

This page in every modality

The argument is performed, not just stated. Each version carries the same content.

  • Signed Full page in sign language by a Deaf creator — in production, per locale.
  • Spoken, captioned A plain-language spoken version with captions — in production.
  • Text This page. Use the Listen button to hear it read aloud, or the Display menu to change size and contrast.
  • Transcript Ships with every video above.