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.

ITV News is failing to caption its social media content appropriately, saving it only for the occasional video, as opposed to every video. Accessibility is not a part-time commitment.

And even if the video comes with the platform's automatic captions, which rely on speech recognition, 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.

It's not the first time ITV News has faced issues around its inaccessible content.

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, ITV News (via ITN who provide ITV's news service) said it wasn't going to provide British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation for its Sunak vs Starmer leaders debate.

It was then hit with a pre-action legal letter, and then committed to providing BSL within 24 hours of broadcast. It failed to meet that deadline.

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

Only providing access for select news stories on ITV News and ITV Politics' social channels not only undermines ITV's commitment to accessibility by association, but also ITN's work meeting basic journalistic standards and principles.

Right now, these stories being shared on Instagram Reels and they're completely inaccessible to a large number of people.

It's not good enough that only the occasional video is accessible to deaf and disabled people. It's not appropriate to leave deaf BSL signers to find a 'signed round-up' on ITV's website at the end of the week to catch-up on the week's news, rather than make its social content accessible.

This cannot continue. ITV News must Caption The News.