What AI Makes Cheap In Advertising Accessibility

A flat vector character building a ramp beside a short flight of steps

Advertising accessibility has lost the same argument for twenty years, and the argument was almost always about cost. Captions, audio description and readable alternatives were the first line cut when a budget tightened.

That defence has largely gone. Transcription and captioning are now trivially cheap, description tracks can be drafted in minutes, and translating a caption file across languages costs close to nothing.

What Advertising Accessibility Now Costs

Attention rather than money. A caption file generated automatically is roughly right and needs a person to fix names, product terms and the places where two people talk at once. That pass takes minutes and is the entire remaining cost on most films.

Audio description is harder, because deciding what matters in a shot is an editorial judgement. But a draft written from the script and the edit is a genuine head start on a task most campaigns simply skipped.

The Audience This Reaches

Larger than the industry assumes, and not only people with a permanent disability. Most social video is watched without sound, which makes captions a mainstream comprehension feature that happens to also be an accessibility one.

The commercial framing matters here, because it is the one that survives a budget meeting. Captions are not a courtesy. They are how a substantial share of the audience receives the words that were paid for.

Accessibility used to be the line that got cut. It is now the cheapest line on the estimate.

What Agencies Should Change

Put it in the estimate as standard rather than as an option, since an option is a question and a question invites a no. Assign the human check to a named person in the delivery process.

And stop treating it as a compliance topic. A film that can be understood with the sound off, by someone who reads Hindi rather than English, on a slow connection, is simply better distributed, which is the argument the finance director was waiting for.