Captions are not just for accessibility — they're how modern students study
When researchers ask students whether they use captions, the result is consistent: a majority of students with no hearing impairment use captions when available. The reasons are mundane but compounding: noisy environments, fast lecturers, second-language listeners, complex vocabulary, the simple reality that reading and listening together encodes better than listening alone. The accessibility framing is correct, but it understates the real audience. Captions are how students study now.
When transcripts are searchable and persistent, they become the highest-utility artifact a course produces. A student preparing for an exam can search 'photosynthesis Calvin cycle' across the entire semester's lectures and land on the exact two minutes where the instructor explained it. That's a fundamentally different study experience from re-watching a 50-minute video on 1.5x speed.