Captions

Why are captions required?

Videos must contain captions so that those that have blindness or deafness can still perceive your content. For example, perhaps you have made a video of various locations across campus that you want potential students to know about. There is a soundtrack of music but no spoken word. In this case, the captions would contain an audio description of the images. This way, someone that has deafness will still be able to gain the information by reading the captions. Someone that has blindness will be able to perceive the information because their screenreader will read the captions to them. If the video images contained images of words, those words should also be included in the captions.

Captions must not be 'burned in' on the video. This not only causes issues for those distracted by captions, but it also renders the captions as a file that is not accessible. Caption files are .SRT formatted files and not only allow the viewer to turn captions on and off but it makes the captions available to assistive technology so they can be presented as braille on a refreshable braille device. See CAPTION FILES below for assistance.

Live Captions

Learn how to present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint, from Microsoft. PowerPoint for Office 365 can transcribe your words as you present and display them on-screen as captions in the same language you are speaking, or as subtitles translated to another language.

Adding Captions to Videos

Closed Caption (CC)

Closed Captions (CC) Training Guide

Faculty are encouraged to self-enroll in the Canvas course, “Focus on Planning: Accessibility”. The course’s section regarding Video and Audio Accessibility is included below to assist during the current environment. In the future, you are encouraged to visit the Canvas course. It is an excellent resource published by the Center for Distance Education (CDE).

Captions Files

  • Use Studio to generate captions (included with Canvas)
  • Use Echo360 to generate a transcript that you can edit into a caption file
  • Use live-captioning in Teams (note: this is auto-generated only)
  • Use live-captioning in PowerPoint (note: this is auto-generated only)
  • Pay a third party to create the file (such as Rev, CaptionSync, or Cielo24.
  • Use Camtasia to generate captions or to convert a transcript into captions (Camtasia is paid software)

Using Studio

Studio captions are at least 80% accurate and include punctuation.

Who to contact

To have voice to text turned on or to request closed captioning, contact the Echo360 administrator on campus, Don Lane. He can be reached at [email protected] or 817-272-3296.