Ensuring Accurate Captioning

[Information on this page created by Helen Graves, shared CC by 4.0 ]

What Is "Appropriate Captioning"?

Many instructors aren't aware that auto-generated captioning (as is found on most YouTube videos) is not sufficient for accessibility. Proper captioning needs punctuation and appropriate word-matching. (If you doubt me, try watching a poorly captioned video with the sound turned off!)

Depending on the ownership of the video, there are several options.

Requesting Community Captioning on YouTube

Viewers can add or edit captions to existing YouTube content. Some video owners are not aware of this option so if Community Captions is not enabled, you can request the owner turn it by contacting them through the Comments field on the video page. I usually say something like this:

This is a great video I'd love to include in my XXX online course for XXX college. It's required that our video content have accurate captions to meet accessibility guidelines. Would you, or whoever manages your YouTube channel, be willing to enable the Community Captions feature Links to an external site. (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052538?hl=en) so I can provide appropriate captioning, which you would then need to approve? Thanks so much!

Filtered Search

To find properly captioned videos, do a search on YouTube or Google for whatever search terms are appropriate and then filter for “closed captioned.” You’ll still have to double-check to make sure the captioning is good enough, but it will cut down on the number of obviously bad choices. =-)

YouTube:

[be aware the filtering options don't show until you've entered a search term]

Google:

Make sure you've selected the "Videos" category to make the captioning filter available.

 

This blog post from 3C Media explains, What Is Audio Description? Links to an external site.