Media capability is accelerating fast. Captions and alt text are already widely supported, and there is continuous development taking place to support audio descriptions for advertising in both broadcast and digital spaces. It’s essential to understand what’s possible for the placements in your media plan in order to plan your campaign production accordingly.
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Many broadcasters already support closed captions across many of their placements, both in traditional and digital platforms, with development of further capability happening. Read more in egta's Practical Guide to Access Services in TV Advertising.
More than 80% of TV ad impressions in the UK offer accessibility by way of captions, so TV advertisers should plan to produce them.
In particular, support for traditional linear television has been in place for some time. We are seeing fast development take place for digitally delivered television, and it’s important to work with your broadcast delivery partner to understand the most current capability.
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Advertising on linear TV in France has support for captioning and audio description on TF1 Pub (TF1 and TNT channels), France TV, M6PUB and Canal+. Support on streaming TV is expected to start rolling out in 2025, starting with France TV and TF1 Pub.
According to data from Extreme Reach analysed in November 2024, just over 12% of ads in France are being captioned and just under 4% are being audio described. Faire group members are showing much higher rates of adoption, with more than half of their ads being captioned and 1 in 5 being audio described. Learn more about the Faire program.
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Accessibility is a priority for TF1 Pub and we aim to continue working with industry partners to ensure greater accessibility on TV advertising. As President of egta, I would like to encourage all partners in the industry, and in particular all TV colleagues, to embark on this journey. Everyone wins if our content and commercial messages are made accessible to all.
- Laurent Bliaut, Deputy Director General, TF1 Pub
To enable advertisers to reach 100% of their audiences, including people with disabilities, we call on broadcasters across the world to continue to build their support for closed captions and audio description. And we call on advertisers to ask for this capability to improve.
Closed caption subtitling for broadcast is different to creating closed captions or open captions for digital and social media. The broadcast file (STL) is more restrictive than the digital file (SRT) as it has to comply with broadcast standards to ensure it transmits. You should therefore expect different costs for production of STL files. Software that is easily available for SRT creation is not suitable for broadcast.
Make sure to plan time to consider the placement of closed captions on broadcast creative to avoid pack shots, supers, legal text, price points, faces and more. Most automated solutions generate text with the same placement regardless of these other visual features, which are common to broadcast advertising. Remember to plan time and budget for quality checks and testing.
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