Accessibility FAST

Closed Captions

Captions provide a text equivalent of all audio elements in a video, presented visually in time with the video. Closed captions can be toggled on or off by the viewer. Open captions are ‘burned’ into the video and cannot be turned off.

Traditionally, we think of captions as an accommodation for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video due to hearing loss. Statistics suggest 4-5% of the general population experience some form of hearing loss. That number increases to around 20% for people over age 60. However, 80% of 18 to 25-year-olds regularly use captions when watching video.[1]

On this page:

Captions are essential for:

  • D/deaf and hard of hearing viewers
  • Viewers experiencing a temporary barrier such as an ear infection
  • Viewers experiencing a situational barrier such as being in a loud environment

Captions also benefit:

  • All viewers, regardless of access means because:
    • Captions aid comprehension, focus, and memory[2]
    • 90 percent of all students who use closed captions find them helpful for learning.[3]
    • Captions ensure names and terminology are communicated exactly as they are spelled.
  • Viewers watching a video with accents other than their own.
  • User experience by allowing viewers to choose to turn on or off the captions.
  • Creators by allowing them to index and search video via subtitle timestamps.
  • SEO.
  • Creators to easily locate a specific topic and create video chapters.
  • Creators to convert audio content to text form

Best Practices

Writing captions can be an intensive process. Consider the following best practices to write accurate captions:

Kaltura Guide

Ordering Captions

  1. Navigate to your media on Langara College MediaSpace or in Brightspace via My Tools > My Media.
  2. Select Actions > Caption & Enrich.
  3. Click Submit button.
  4. Within 30 minutes, the machine-generated captions should be completed, which then need to be edited for accuracy.

Editing Captions

  1. Navigate to your media on Langara College MediaSpace or in Brightspace via My Tools > My Media.
  2. Select Actions > Edit.
  3. Select the Captions tab.
  4. Click Edit Captions button.
  5. Edit captions for accuracy.
  6. Click Save and then Back.

Upload Captions

  1. Navigate to your media on Langara College MediaSpace or in Brightspace via My Tools > My Media.
  2. Select Actions > Edit.
  3. Select the Captions tab.
  4. Click Upload captions file button.
  5. Select file and complete required fields.
  6. Click Save.

Downsub.com allows you to copy subtitles from a video on YouTube and upload them to Kaltura. Simply paste the YouTube URL on Downsub and then upload the .SRT file to Kaltura as outlined above.

Learn more about Kaltura

Kaltura offers support for uploading caption or transcript files, manual captioning, and automatic captions.

Editing Kaltura captions.

Kaltura instructions for uploading a caption file to a video.

Kaltura instructions for managing and editing captions.

Information on Kaltura’s captions & enrichment services.

Langara Education Technology step-by-step instructions on captioning Kaltura videos.

H5P

H5P requires .VTT caption files. The below guide shows how to generate .VTT files and add them to H5P video elements.

Further Resources

Toronto Metropolitan University’s guide to captioning and description.

WebAIM guide to captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions.

Described and Captioned Media Program’s guidelines and best practices for captioning educational video.

BBC Subtitle Guidelines (the most extensive resource for captioning guidelines on the web).

  1. Youngs, "Young viewers prefer TV subtitles, research suggests" ↵
  2. "More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video." - Gernsbacher, "Video Captions Benefit Everyone" ↵
  3. Mary Ellen Dello Stritto and Katie Linder, "A Rising Tide: How Closed Captions Can Benefit All Students" ↵
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License

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Accessibility Handbook for Teaching and Learning Copyright © 2023 by Briana Fraser and Luke McKnight is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.