Captions are mandated primarily for Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but captions have other benefits including:
When vocabulary is unfamiliar
When the speaker is using an unfamiliar dialect
When audio is not clear or audio is not available. This last includes instances when audio quality is poor and instances when a person cannot listen to audio because of their work or study environment.
Machine-generated captions and transcripts are not sufficient for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users. But they do provide a starting point for you to go in and manually edit anything that was transcribed incorrectly.
Consider writing a script for your recorded video which can later be used as a transcript. This will also help you to revise auto-generated captions and transcripts.
Simply avoiding creating audio content is not the answer. Students with visual impairment benefit from hearing your narration.
Guides for Creating Captions and Transcripts
Below is a series of links to guides for creating and editing captions or transcripts in a variety of multimedia tools.
You may be familiar with MediaHub. This is where all Zoom cloud recordings are automatically stored (don't panic if your Zoom cloud recordings have vanished; they're probably in your MediaHub account.) Captions are easily generated and edited in Kaltura.
Here is a guide on adding captions to VoiceThread. VoiceThread is a great tool for multimedia content because of the ability to easily create captions as you go.
This is a guide provided by YouTube on how to add and edit captions for your videos. YouTube auto-captions have a bad reputation, but they can always be edited by you to be more accurate.