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Accessible Technology

Captions

Overview

Captions provide a text version of a video’s spoken audio, plus a description of important sounds, synchronized with the video.  Typically users can toggle captions on or off using a CC button on their media player. Captions must be available in order to ensure audio content is accessible to people from the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community. They also help people for whom English is a second language, people who process information better if presented in multiple modes (sound and text), people who are unfamiliar with the vocabulary used in the video, people who have the sound turned off on their devices, and people in noisy environments who are unable to hear the sound from their devices.

Techniques

The techniques in this section are for captioning recorded video. For information on real-time captioning, see our Live Captioning page.

Techniques

YouTube automatically generates captions for most videos when they’re uploaded. It does so using automatic speech recognition technology, and the captions are rarely accurate enough to be used as an accessibility solution. However, if their accuracy is decent and captions can be perfected with only a few minor corrections, the easiest way to correct them is to do so directly in YouTube.  For instructions see YouTube’s help page on how to Edit Captions.

Depending on the accuracy of YouTube’s auto-captions, the length of the video, and other factors, it may be more cost-effective to get the video captioned through other means, as described at the top of this page. The end product will be a caption file, which can be uploaded to YouTube by the video’s account owner.  For instructions on how to upload captions, see YouTube’s help page on how to Add your own closed captions.

Unlike YouTube, Vimeo does not include machine-generated automatic captions for free accounts, but they do offer this functionality for paid accounts. All accounts have the ability to upload captions that are obtained through other means. Additional information is available on the following Vimeo help pages:

The UW offers lecture capture services through Panopto.

Faculty, staff, and students with disabilities can submit an accommodation request to caption Panopto videos by contacting the UW Disability Services Office or Disability Resources for Students. If the accommodation request is approved, all costs of captioning services are covered by the UW.

If there are no active accommodation requests, Panopto will generate automatic speech recognition captions by default. The captions may need to be edited. For more information, see the following resources:

If a Zoom meeting or webinar is recorded and saved to the cloud, Zoom can generate captions for the archived video. This feature needs to be enabled before recording an  event. For information about this feature, see Using Audio Transcription for Cloud Recordings in the Zoom Help Center.

As with their live auto-transcription service, this feature uses automatic speech recognition technology, so is generally not accurate enough to serve as an accommodation for people who depend on captions. To attain a level of accuracy that is suitable for publication, you can either edit the automated captions in Zoom or download the video and caption it through other means. Both methods are described below.

Editing captions in Zoom

Zoom’s auto-captions can be edited directly within Zoom’s web portal. For instructions, see the Viewing and Editing the Saved Transcript section of Zoom’s Audio Transcription help page.

Captioning Zoom Recordings Outside of Zoom

If Zoom’s auto-captions are not accurate enough to be easily edited, it may be more cost-effective to download the MP4 video recording of the Zoom event and send that to a third-party captioning provider. Options are described elsewhere on this page.

Currently, Zoom does not support uploading caption files to replace their automated captions, so in order to make the recorded video available with updated captions, you would need to upload both the MP4 video and caption file elsewhere, such as YouTube.

You will also need to do this if you want to retain a recording longer than is allowed by the UW’s retention period for Zoom recordings. For additional information, see the UW Zoom Cloud Storage FAQ.

Video can be added directly to your Canvas course by uploading a video file through the Rich Content Editor. For information on how to add or view captions to a video that’s uploaded this way, see the following Canvas Guides:

For information on how to caption videos for distribution on common social media platforms, see our Social media page.

Captioning Vendors

Public higher education institutions in the State of Washington, including the University of Washington, have a contract with 3PlayMedia for captioning services. Their services include seamless integrations with YouTube, Panopto, and other platforms. For a list of discount prices and to sign up for an account, see 3PlayMedia’s Washington Higher Education Captioning Contract page.

UW-IT Captioning and Audio Description Service

Accessible Technology Services (ATS) will caption a limited number of UW videos without charge through a service supported by UW-IT. Individuals, departments, and other units at the UW are encouraged to apply for funding to caption highly-visible, high-impact, multiple-use, and/or strategic videos. Examples include:

  • Videos available to the public on a high-use website
  • Videos that will be used multiple times in a course
  • Videos developed by several faculty members to be used in several different classes

For additional information and to apply for this service, please see our Help page.

Additional Resources

  • Captioning Key – Guidelines for effective captioning, an essential resource if captioning your own media.
  • Amara.org – Free online tool and community for captioning and subtitling video.
  • DotSub.com – Free captioning tool
  • Subtitle Horse – Free captioning tool

WCAG 2.1 success criteria

The issues described on this page, and associated Techniques pages, map to the following success criteria in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1: