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.

Back in July, Channel 4 News suddenly stopped manually captioning their social media content, opting instead for automatic captions, which rely on speech recognition.

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

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

This has also meant that while Channel 4 continues to brand itself as an inclusive broadcaster - not least when it comes to its coverage of the Paralympic Games in Paris - its news output (via ITN) completely undermines that message by not being properly accessible to disabled people.

We've already seen reports on disability news being shared online without captions, and disabled people and allies alike pointing out the painful irony.

And we've already seen the public service broadcaster criticised by Ofcom over its subtitles outage in 2021. Channel 4 should understand the importance of high-quality captions at this point.

It's understood that Channel 4's excuse is that their competitors are moving to automatic captions, but a successful petition on this very website has already seen BBC News acknowledge that automatic captions are not appropriate.

They're also believed to claim users won't see a reduction in accessibility per guidance from the Royal National Institution for Deaf people (RNID), but the charity has already gone on the record to point out the issues with automatic captions.

Channel 4 is supposed to be a public service broadcaster, yet this supposedly inclusive channel is actually being exclusive of disabled people by allowing this inaccessible content to be shared with their branding attached to it.

It's not good enough to tell disabled people to read the article on Channel 4 News' website, when they have every right to access the same information, in the same format.

This cannot continue for a moment longer. Channel 4 News must caption the news. They must Bring Back Captions.