Closed Captioning
Introduction to Video Compliance
What is ADA Compliance?
- ADA is Americans with Disabilities Act, which was originally established in 1991 to prohibit the discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including education. Per ADA regulations and a desire to make sure learning is accessible to all, electronic content should have accommodations in place to ensure everyone is able to enjoy it.
Who Benefits from ADA Compliance?
- In short, everyone! While accommodations may be requested by students registered with
Disability Support Services (also called DSS), such accommodations can benefit all
students, especially video compliance.
Students can gain from Captions and Transcriptions by taking advantage of one or more of the following:- Increase focus
- Retain information
- Overcome poor audio
- Overcome an unstable internet connection
- Engage while situated in a sensitive or loud environment
- Understand a speaker with a heavy accent or other articulation difficulties
- The opportunity to slow down the audio to review difficult vocabulary and unfamiliar
terms
- Have a greater understanding of content when English is not the native language
- Increase focus
How do I make sure my videos are compliant?
- Video compliance encompasses these major components:
- Captions and transcripts
- Audio descriptions which can be done by the video creator by describing what is on your screen (charts, graphs, images, etc.) and providing PDF or text versions of your visual aids, such as slides.
- Keyboard accessible video player which is already available with VidGrid.
What is the difference between captions and transcripts?
- Captions appear on screen in sync with the video and are a transcription of the dialogue, sound effects, relevant musical cues, and other relevant audio information. These are beneficial for the deaf, hard of hearing, and second language learners.
- Transcripts are text that is separate from the video, but include a transcription of the dialogue, sound effects, relevant musical cues, and other relevant audio information. These are beneficial for those who utilize screen readers.
How can Digital Learning Help?
Digital Learning will only provide captioning and transcription services for videos made by faculty and staff. Faculty are responsible for editing their videos and posting their videos to their Canvas course(s) unless under contract with Digital Learning for course development. Staff are responsible for editing their videos and posting them to their website(s).
Captioning and transcription can be provided for videos that are in VidGrid hosting platform only. Videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Zoom or other platforms cannot not be captioned at this time, so it is recommended that captioned versions of YouTube and Vimeo videos are found and Zoom videos are put into the VidGrid for captioning.
Due to lack of multilingual staff, captioning can only be provided to English language classes at this time. If you are teaching classes in a language other than English, please contact Contact Us with information about your course to find a solution.
Video Caption Recommendations
Digital Learning is happy to provide three options for Captioning your videos:
- VidGrid: VidGrid is our current video lecture hosting service, where you can upload your videos and embed the videos into your Canvas course. VidGrid has a machine captioning with 85% accuracy, depending on the audio quality.
- YouTube: YouTube also provides automatic captioning if the video meets the audio quality.
- Rev.com: Rev offers human captioning, meaning that professionals are working on creating closed captions. Rev has a 99% accuracy level. Please check their pricing page and consult and get approval from your department chair or Dean before placing an order on Rev.com
Title: Video Caption Recommendations
Length: 13:00
Transcript: Click Here
The above video provides instructions on how to use video captioning tools such as
VidGrid, YouTube, and Rev. For PDF versions, please click on the links below to download
the directions for each tool.
Click to download PDF tutorials: