The fizz from the bottle hits the ceiling, a tiny, celebratory pop that echoes across the open-plan office. Someone hits 237,000 views on the new brand video. High-fives are exchanged. The numbers on the analytics dashboard are a hypnotic, glowing green. It’s a success.

On a different screen, in the muted gray of the comments section, a different story is being written. “I’m learning Portuguese, would love captions to help me follow.” Another one: “As someone who is hard of hearing, this is just noise to me. Please add captions.” A third: “Is there a transcript? I wanted to find the part about the Q3 roadmap but can’t sit through 17 minutes again.”

These comments are not engaged with. They are not problems to be solved; they are inconvenient data points, digital dust swept under the rug of the ever-rising view count. The team sees the 237,000 views. They don’t see the 47 people who asked for a door and were ignored.

Empathy isn’t a feeling you have in a meeting.

It’s an engineering problem.

It’s a design choice. It’s a line item in a budget. It’s a transcript for your podcast. It is the caption on your video.

Without that, it’s just performance art.

The Irony of Inaction

I’ll be the first to admit my own hypocrisy. I used to think of accessibility as a technical garnish, a nice-to-have for a small, specific group of people. For the first two years of my old podcast, I didn’t produce a single transcript. Not one. I talked for hours about communication and connection, all while building a sound-proof wall around my own content. I criticized gated communities and then put a digital one around my own words. The irony is so thick I could choke on it now. The excuse was always time. Or money. Or the belief that nobody *really* needed it.

It’s a flimsy excuse that collapses under the slightest pressure. I just didn’t see it as my problem.

Daniel’s Dilemma: The Unsearchable Product

I was talking to a man named Daniel E.S. the other day. He trains therapy animals-specifically, dogs that work with children who have severe anxiety. His work is incredible, a delicate ballet of non-verbal cues, patience, and learned behaviors. He told me he’d recently paid for a high-end online course from a major industry player. It cost him $777. The course consisted of 27 video modules, full of brilliant insights he needed to do his job. But there were no captions. No transcripts.

He wasn’t asking for a favor. He was asking for the product he paid for to be usable. He was asking for a searchable index, the most basic function of digital information. The company that preached about gentle, responsive care for vulnerable populations had created a product that was hostile to a user under stress.

It’s not an edge case; it’s the whole case.

The challenges of accessibility are not peripheral; they are central to truly inclusive design.

Debunking the “Too Hard” Myth

The most common pushback is that creating accessible media is too hard, too expensive, too time-consuming. It’s a convenient fiction we tell ourselves to justify inaction. We imagine a team of scribes in a dark room, painstakingly typing out every word, a process that would add weeks to any project timeline. That might have been true a decade ago, but technology has ruthlessly eliminated that excuse. The argument that it takes too much effort to gerar legenda em video is a ghost story told to scare marketing departments away from a budget line. The tools are now so fast and automated that the barrier isn’t technical anymore. It’s purely cultural. It’s a choice.

Making your content accessible does more than just serve those with hearing impairments. It serves the non-native speaker struggling with slang and fast talkers. It serves the person on a loud train who forgot their headphones. It serves the researcher who needs to quote a specific line from your CEO’s keynote. It serves the parent trying to watch your tutorial while their baby is sleeping on their chest. You are not designing for a minority; you are designing for everyone, at different moments of their very human, very messy lives.

Transcripts and captions are the digital curb cuts for your content.

This reminds me of the ‘curb cut’ effect. Those little ramps on sidewalks were designed for people in wheelchairs. But who uses them? Everyone. People with strollers, travelers with rolling luggage, workers with heavy carts, kids on skateboards. An accommodation for a few created a better, more fluid environment for the many.

The Insidious Exclusion

By refusing to implement them, you are making a quiet, powerful statement about who you value. You are saying your message is only for people who can hear perfectly, who have the time to watch a full video without interruption, who speak the language flawlessly, and who never, ever need to quickly find a piece of information again. It’s an act of unintentional, and therefore more insidious, exclusion. It undermines every single diversity and inclusion initiative you launch. You can’t claim you want everyone to have a seat at the table if the invitation is written in invisible ink.

That brand video with 237,000 views? Its real success isn’t measured in plays, but in its resonance. How many people truly absorbed the message? How many felt seen and respected by the brand? How many could use the information shared? A view from someone who can’t understand what’s being said isn’t a view. It’s a missed connection. It’s a potential loyalist who was turned away at the door because you couldn’t be bothered to build a ramp.

A view from someone who can’t understand isn’t a view.

It’s a missed connection. It’s a potential loyalist turned away at the door.

The Quiet Work of Closing the Gap

Daniel, the animal trainer, ended up taking matters into his own hands. He found a service to transcribe the videos himself, building the searchable library the course creators had failed to provide. He did it for himself, but he also did it for the kids and the dogs he serves. He built the tool he needed because his mission of care and empathy was more important than the inconvenience. He practiced the values the company only preached.

There is no grand conclusion here, no neat summary of takeaways. There is only the quiet work of closing the gap between the values you broadcast and the experience you actually provide. It’s about looking at that comment section not as a nuisance, but as a to-do list. It’s recognizing that someone asking for captions isn’t a critic; they’re a willing audience member asking for a way in.