Guide to Transcripts and Captions

Special thanks to Dave Giberson of the San Diego Community College District Online Learning

Pathways group for permission to borrow from his excellent guidelines and tutorials.

I. Overview

Media posted on the Web should be made accessible to individuals with disabilities, including

visually and hearing impaired people. This means providing transcripts and/or captions for audio

and video. You can understand the need for transcripts and captions if you keep in mind how

people may access content.

• Blind individuals often use screen readers, which is software that uses audio output to

III. Prioritization

Providing transcripts and/or captions may be time-consuming and poses costs. Your first step is

to be judicious about what you post. Consider whether the multimedia project serves your

department’s mission and is of high enough quality to be worth the effort and cost.

In addition, the prospect of captioning can overwhelm anyone with a large media repository. You

will need to prioritize.

Considerations for prioritization:

1. Focus on transcribing and captioning new media projects and, for the time, being

don’t worry about retroactive captioning.

2. Review your posted media and take down any that is of low quality or no longer

o Media intended for systemwide or campuswide audiences

4. Recognize situations when transcripts or captions may not be necessary:

o Media used for one-time courses in which no students need accommodation

o Media used for internal audiences that require no accommodation

o Videos of large, live events, such as commencement ceremonies

IV. Whether to Transcribe or Caption

Some situations require only transcripts. Others require captions. Note that to make captions you

must first have a transcript.

1. Provide transcripts for audio-only recordings.

• ensures that deaf or hearing impaired individuals can use the video,

• supports different learning styles, especially for people who prefer to read instead of

listen, and

• is useful when it’s not possible or convenient to play the sound.

There are two types of captions:

• Closed captions: This is the technique to use because the viewer can turn off the

captioning.

• Open captions: Captions appear without the option to remove them.

V. How to Get Transcripts and Closed Captions

You may hire an outside service to transcribe and caption your video, or you may do it yourself.

1. Outside Services

There are many transcription/captioning services available. You can request them to do the

whole process for you – take your video, make a transcript from it, and then add closed captions

transcript and have them use it to add captions to the video, and then return the file to you to

Steps for Creating Transcripts

1. Create an audio file. If starting with a video, extract the soundtrack into a stand-alone

sound (MP3) file that can be used for transcription. One way to accomplish this is to

import the video into Camtasia and export the soundtrack as an MP3 digital audio file

(tutorial for extracting the audio from a video file to MP3 format).

2. Transcribe the audio. You can do this manually or using voice recognition software. A

good rule of thumb is to manually transcribe when the automatic transcription is less than

70% accurate. Once you have a transcript, you will need to proofread and correct it.

o Manually. Once the audio file is created it can be used in a manual transcription

process - a text transcript is created by typing while listening intermittently to the

convert the audio file into a rough text transcript. This transcript must then be

edited to produce a usable document. The efficiency of this approach vs. the

manual method described above is variable, but the tight integration between

Camtasia Studio 7.1+ and the Windows voice-recognition technology makes this

a good choice for videos involving a single speaker for whom a voice recognition

videos or those for which a speaker voice profile cannot be created.

3. Tutorials:

o Using Windows VR and Camtasia Studio

o Using Dragon Naturally Speaking

o The classic example is a using green button for “go” and a red button for “stop.”

able to distinguish the colors. To remedy this situation, provide a text indicator

that can be read by the screen reader and the colorblind user.

VIII. Additional Information

• Web Captioning Overview: http://webaim.org/techniques/captions/

• Best Practices in Online Captioning: http://joeclark.org/access/captioning/bpoc/

• Captioning Web Video (SDCCD): http://online2.sdccd.edu/tutorials/captioning/