Captions for Video
For help, contact: Karen Sorensen
Why this is Important
Video captions benefit not only those who cannot hear the sound, they benefit non-native English speakers, people who don't have speakers on their computer, those listening to a video in a noisy room or those who learn better by reading and listening to the content.
How to Achieve this Accessibility Standard
See Media for Your Course for suggestions of places to find the best educational sources of media. See Searching for Captioned Media for ways to find captioned media on YouTube and the Internet in general (with Google's Advanced Video Search).
Self-Produced Media
Although it is preferred that you caption self-produced media during production, uncaptioned self-produced media is allowed for one term as long as you do not have a student who requires captioning as an accommodation. Here are some tools that will help you caption any self-produced media you use for more than one term (all of these techniques are much easier if you use a script during recording):
Recording Tools
First you need to record your video
- Camtasia: Camtasia is a full featured screen recorder and editor. Distance Learning instructors can get a license for Camtasia.
- WebCam in D2L: D2L has a feature in the Advanced Editing tab (Insert Stuff) that allows you to record from your webcam and embed the recording directly into your web page.
- Flipcam or other video camera: You can of course use a camera to record video. The file output type should be an mp4.
Transcription Tools
Next you need a transcript of the audio portions of the video.
- Camtasia: Camtasia for Windows works with the built-in Windows's voice recognition tool to help you transcribe your video. For best results, train the voice recognition tool to your voice.
- YouTube: You will need your own YouTube account. Load your video on to your YouTube account. Then edit the automatic captions that YouTube creates. This short video explains the captioning process using YouTube.
- Google's Transcribe tool is an easy to use transcription tool if you have an individual audio track. The tool must be opened in the Google Chrome browser to work. It will slow down the audio enough that you can type out the dialog. Then you just copy and paste what you typed into a text (.txt) document. .
- Text file: You can always just type out all of the audio information in a text file (.txt filetype)
Captioning Tools
Captioning is when the transcript is syncronized to the video. These tools can help.
- Camtasia: When you use Camtasia and the speech to text tool, the transcript is already timed to the video. You may need to tighten up the syncronization using the timeline if you've had to edit the transcript much.
- YouTube: If you edit the automatic captions in YouTube, they are already syncronized to the video. If the timing needs to be changed, you will need to download the captions and edit them with a text editing tool like Notepad.
- You can also upload a transcript (.txt) file to YouTube and YouTube will synchronize it to your video.
- Send us your transcript and video, and we will synchronize the transcript to the video. Email karen.sorensen@pcc.edu..
Commercial Media
You do not have to caption commercial media. If you are just choosing media for your course, try searching for captioned videos first. If you or your department don't own a captioned version of the media, employ the assistance of your Subject Area Librarian to help you find a captioned version. If no captioned version is available to buy or borrow, you may use the uncaptioned version in your course and it will be accommodated on a case by case basis by Disability Services and Distance Education/Instructional Support.
Online Meetings
If your class is going to hold real-time meetings online using software such as Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) and you have a student who needs a captioning accommodation, please contact Sharon Brown to set up a real-time captioner for the meeting.
If you don't have a student that needs captioning and you will not be saving a recording of the meeting for more than the current term, it does not need to be captioned. If you do want to use the recording next term or in the future, it does need to be captioned as a video.
To accommodate other accessibility needs in an online conference, see the Blackboard Collaborate Accessibility Guide.
Copyright
Before you use any commercial media that is protected by copyright, fill out the Teach Act Checklist to make sure you are cleared to use it. If you are, the Teach Act stipulates that the media may only be available to students during that module. It should not be available for longer than that module is available. You can set D2L to open and close a module on specified dates.