Captioning Basics Overview
Captioning Basics Overview
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Which Students Benefit from Accessible Videos?
All of Your Students!
“When UX doesn’t consider all users, shouldn’t it be known as “Some User Experience [...]?”
-Billy Gregory, Senior Accessibility Engineer at The Paciello Group
This tweet from Billy Gregory, Senior Accessibility Engineer at The Paciello Group, reminds us that user experience (UX) design must strive to be as inclusive as possible. Effective design is crucial for all students' success.
Video and audio presentations must have a textual equivalent. This means videos must have video captioning, and audio recordings must have a text transcript.
Captions are the synchronized text equivalent of audio content from a video, and must provide the same information in a text format that is provided through the audio, including speaker identification and sound effects. In other words, whatever is being heard should be illustrated in the captions.
A Design for One is a Design for All
Video accessibility improves access and comprehension for all users, regardless of disability? Robert Keith Collins, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, found that captioning videos can significantly improve comprehension and test scores Links to an external site..
Video Accessibility Helps All
Captions greatly improve learning and comprehension for people who identify as/are:
- second language English speakers. Captions help non-native speakers understand key concepts and interpret complex words and phrases.
- watching videos in public spaces, such as on public transportation, in a library, or in a shared living space where it may be noisy.
- multi-modal learners.
- studying and reviewing a topic. Captions, transcripts, and other video metadata allow students to navigate to specific portions of videos that they need to review.
- using multiple types of devices (cell phone, tablet, computer).
Creating an inclusive environment is the right thing to do -- and it's the law. By several state and federal regulations, students have the right to have the same access to all online instructional materials. ALL web-based materials (HTML files, PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video files, audio files, images) for use with online, hybrid, blended, or face-to-face classes must be made compliant.
At the end of this module, you should be able to:
- Identify if a video has accurate and properly formatted closed captions.
- Identify which closed-captioning platforms are used based on video ownership.