We all benefit from captions or subtitles at some point - whether it's a late-night social media scroll with the sound off, sitting down to watch a foreign language film, or you're a disabled person like me for whom they are a vital accessibility tool.

Around the time of King Charles' coronation, BBC News and BBC News UK suddenly stopped manually captioning their Instagram Reels, opting instead for the app's automatic captions, which rely on speech recognition.

The problem, however, is that these are completely inappropriate and inaccessible:

1. words are missed out completely, or mis-transcribed;
2. if a Reel contains important music, the captions fail to pick it up;
3. sentences are broken up at inappropriate points;
4. multiple speakers and crosstalk aren't denoted effectively;
5. they fail to appear on desktop;
6. sometimes they fail to appear altogether, rending a video inaccessible to disabled viewers.

All of this is in breach of the BBC's own Subtitle Guidelines and Digital Product Accessibility Policy - the latter of which explicitly states the broadcaster "aims to provide disabled people with an inclusive experience that is compatible to that enjoyed by non-disabled people".

Disabled people are having to take the extra mental step of figuring out what a word in the subtitles/captions is meant to say, whereas hearing audiences do not have that problem. This is not a comparable experience.

Even so, the BBC still believes it meets their own policies and there's no issues with the automatic captions - even when they've previously admitted they are "prone to anomalies"; that "the quality will be worse"; and that the subtitles are plagued with "issues", to the extent that they reverted back to using human-generated subtitles for several months while they investigated said "issues", only to give up in November 2023 and go back to posting Reels where the auto captions fail to load altogether.

Outrageous excuses I've received from the BBC in response to this issue range from accessibility not providing "value" to licence fee payers, and automatic captions allowing for "more content for readers" (so quantity over quality and accessibility).

This is despite disabled people being licence fee payers as well, and countless other UK-based and international BBC News Instagram accounts adding human-generated captions to their Reels, without issue.

There are urgent, pressing news stories which require accurate, high-quality reporting and accessibility to reach the largest possible audience: wars in Ukraine and Gaza, sensitive legal stories where the wrong mistake can land organisations in trouble, to name just two examples.

Continuing to use Instagram's atrocious automatic captions not only undermines the BBC's commitment to accessibility, but also to professional journalistic standards.

Right now, these stories being shared on Instagram Reels and they're completely inaccessible to a large number of people. And disabled licence fee payers are paying to miss out on this content. 

It's not good enough to tell disabled people to read the article on the BBC News website, when they have every right to access the same information, in the same format.

This cannot continue for a moment longer. BBC News and BBC News UK must Bring Back Captions.