Matt McGarrity: As teachers...
we're really now entering a time where our content is available
in so many different ways on so many different platforms.
And we are not servicing so many of our students
if we're not increasing accessibility
and captioning is one of the most important ways
that we can be doing that.
And the fact that we now have the technological tools
to do it, is ...
if ... if we don't we're missing out on a huge opportunity.
And we're actually missing out on what I would see is one
of the missions of the University, to increase access.
Christine Liao: Captions are a benefit for people
who miss information ...
It's an ability to go back and catch
up with the information that's being presented.
If there's a new word that a person's never seen before,
they can see it on the captioning.
Sirfame Lin: I do use captions on my own sometimes
in like louder environments where it's hard to hear,
or when I'm not used to like some sort of like dialect
or lingo people are using.
Jessie Zhang: I think things have to be captioned
so that it is more accessible to anyone,
so not just geared towards the deaf or hard of hearing people
but it can be helpful for international students.
Patrick Conway: For professors
who are considering captioning their courses,
I highly encourage it because it provides accessibility
to more students than you may imagine.
Terrill Thompson: Well captioning makes video accessible
for people who can't hear the audio,
so somebody who's deaf or hard of hearing,
or somebody who's situationally hearing impaired
and for whatever reason, they're in a loud environment,
or they're in an environment where they can't
turn up the audio and don't have access to speakers,
then they benefit from captions.
Phil Reid: If they're at a coffee shop or it's late
at night in their dorm and they need to keep basically the sound
down because their roommate's sleeping,
if you have captioning makes still the lecture materials very
available and easy for students to access them
in those types of environments.
Jason Smith: As a certified sign language interpreter,
I've had a unique experience in that I've seen
some of the frustrations that deaf people may have
when unable to access, you know,
basic communication.
Christine Liao: Captions are important because when you get
into a classroom and the teacher is presenting, say a video tape,
I'll have an interpreter in the classroom, I have to look
at the interpreter and look at the screen at the same time
to get the information.
It's important for my education to be able
to access information.
Phil Reid: There's a wide variety of students that benefit
from captioning, issues of accessibility obviously but also
for students for whom English isn't their primary language,
It really makes the material more accessible to them.
And frankly for students who, because I teach chemistry
and science instruction, who use a lot of technical language,
so it gives students the ability to kind of look at words
where they've heard them they can actually see them as well,
and start to make connections between what they're hearing
and what the word actually is, and so it's beneficial
in that regard as well.
Christine Liao: Seeing technical words
in captioning is very beneficial
because if I have an ASL interpreter signing a really big
chemistry word, they're going to finger spell it really fast
and I'm not going to know how to spell it.
Jason Smith: Lecture capture allows instructors
and even students and full time staff the ability
to download software onto their computer
and record their screen while also recording with a camera
and their audio, to deliver educational content
that shows the screen and also shows you in a picture
in picture to deliver content in ...
in a more interactive way.
Patrick Conway: Where the caption is,
I get the material back and I am able to search
through the material for key words
Jason Smith: Within the lecture capture system
that the University of Washington offers
there is the ability to ...
to do a keyword search of the video that you're watching.
In fact you can do a keyword search of all the videos
within your account, which we think is a pretty powerful
feature because the search will actually search
against the transcript that is created by the caption vendor,
so essentially what that means is every word
that is recorded is now able to be searched upon.
Matt McGarrity: The search function
with captioning is just something we ...
we haven't even really started to incorporate as lecturers,
but it's what we've always wanted, right?
So let's say you've got a student preparing for the test,
they're looking at their notes, they see this concept
and they remember faintly something from the lecture
when they were sitting in the lecture hall.
With the search function, what you've done is created the class
as a searchable database and so, in that case, what they're using
that lecture for is, you know, as a searchable way of engaging
and making connections between concepts,
connections that as a lecturer you would want them to make
or maybe even as a teacher you wouldn't even guess
that they would make.
Terrill Thompson: Every video that's uploaded to YouTube
gets captioned automatically,
and that's machine generated captions, so they're not...
the science isn't great at this point, it's getting better.
Sometimes it produces an accurate enough transcript,
or accurate enough captions, that you can go in
and edit those captions and it doesn't take very long to do
that if it just has a few mistakes here and there.
To caption video on YouTube,
you have to be the owner of the video
and then you can edit the automatic captions
that YouTube creates or you can upload captions
that you create but you ...
you do have to be the owner of the video in order to do that.
If people want to create their own captions,
do their own captioning,
then there are a variety of tools that support that.
They can do that for free using various tools
that are available, either software that they can download
or free tools that are available on the web.
Captions open up so many possibilities
because if you think about how much video is being cranked out now,
a lot of the world's information is now in video form
and with captions we have access to all that's being said
within those videos, so there's data galore
and it's time synced data so that opens all sorts
of possibilities for new research or just different ways
of interacting with information.
Phil Reid: The feedback I've gotten about captioning
has just been remarkable
in particular for students for whom English is not their primary language.
They just absolutely love it.
And my student evaluation forms that I get, that comes out
loud and clear that they really appreciate captioning
because it just makes the material more accessible.