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When and How to �Caption Your Videos

Lucy Greco

@accessaces

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Overview

  • The challenge behind captioning
  • Finding out what others are doing
  • Learning from the results
  • Ways to start your captioning journey

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Background

  • We were confronted with a large number of videos being made by everyone and their dog that we needed to caption
  • We already had a lot of videos
  • We needed a plan to address existing and future videos
  • Lastly, we needed to educate everyone about how to address the problem

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Getting over the sticker shock of prices and number of hours

  • If you approach this sensibly:
    • You can take your time, and;
    • It won’t cost as much as it might initially seem

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Ask everyone what they are doing

  • In postsecondary education, no one does anything without asking everyone else what they are doing first
  • We sent a survey out to a large group of educational accessibility leaders
  • We asked what they were doing, how they were doing it, and how much it cost

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What we asked (sample questions)

  • If you are captioning, what are you captioning?
    • Administrative messages
    • Athletic events
    • Student life
    • Courses
    • Resources
    • Online and in-person training
  • How much content was being captioned or requested?
  • Who paid for it?
  • If you aren’t captioning everything, do you offer a way for people to request it?

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What we really needed to know

  • If you accept requests for captioning, how often do people ask for it?
  • For non-coursework-related videos, how much does it cost?
  • What means do you use to caption?
    • Professional agencies?
    • In-house professionals?
    • Student employees?
  • Where do the funds come from?

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What we learned

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Most institutions have some way for people to request captioning

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What we learned overall

  • Most institutions have their primary focus on students requiring accommodations
  • A lot of universities are captioning a great deal of non-course-related videos
  • Almost all universities have some means for people to request captions
  • Descriptive video is still less frequent but tends to show the same trends

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So now what?

We wanted to come up with a plan to start the process of increasing the number of videos to caption.

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Create a priorities checklist

Of course, when a student needs a video for class work, it must always be captioned!

  1. Videos that are conveying emergency status and information
  2. Any video that is made to represent the organization should be captioned
  3. Use a tool to determine what the top 10% of watched videos are
    1. Within this group, only include items that are lasting, i.e., if it’s a one time event that a few weeks later no one cares about, then it should be dropped from the list
  4. Topics of interest to the community as a whole should be captioned
    • Example: if it's for students and you’re a school and all students would want to watch
  5. Topics of interest to people with disabilities should always be captioned
  6. Anything with international impact should be captioned (to allow for various translations)

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Why not just give people a way to ask for captions when you missed something?

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It's the right thing to do!

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Tools you can use to keep down the price

  • YouTube auto captions are easy to edit and fix. Take the time and increase your views as well.
  • WGBH has a tool called CADET for creating captions and descriptions, which is free and easy to learn.
  • There are many services out there that will caption for you. If you have a large number of videos that need captioning, you can often negotiate the cost.

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Questions?