After an educator creates original video material for online distribution, an important task remains – providing an accurate transcript and closed captions file for online streaming. Closed captioning for video ensures effective and equal communication for all. It’s also the law. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (amended in 1998 with the passage of section 508), the Individuals with Disabilities Education of 1975 (IDEA), ActTitles II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA amended in 2008), and the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) of 2010 have a direct impact on higher education in the U.S. Students with disabilities must be provided aids or services to assure equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from a college or university education (public or private). With the growing number of online courses being produced by institutions of higher learning, it is critical that digital media materials be adapted to accommodate learner variability.

Aside from legal compliance to prevent disability discrimination, there are numerous other benefits to closed captioning.

• Captions improve retention and focus. Captions allow students to read while viewing video, improving overall information retention and recall, versus oral-only or visual-only instruction. Additionally, some video apps allow students to search for and jump to specific captions within an online video and create annotations, take quizzes, and share comments, thus enabling discoverability and improved content engagement.
• Captioning enhances visibility to search engines. Captioning helps video content surface higher and faster by allowing search engines to index closed captioned text for keywords, concepts, and speakers. Video with captioning increases viewer completion rate, which in turn, raises the SEO (search engine optimization) quality rating for content engagement, and potentially widens the global viewing audience.
• Captioning is venue-agnostic. Whether a video is playing on a kiosk in a campus center or on a mobile device in a classroom, with captioning, a video’s message is successfully conveyed, regardless of the viewing venue.
• Captions improve reading comprehension and literacy. Captions improve comprehension for non-native English speakers and help clarify dialogue when technical terms are used or when speakers have an accent.

If you are creating original video materials for online distribution, consider one of these four closed captioning (CC) options:

1. Use non-linear editing software (Final Cut Pro X 10.4.1 or Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1) to manually create, edit, and export closed captioning for your video production. Alternatively, consider using an automatic transcription service like SpeedScriber that produces time-matched, editable captions that can be imported back into Final Cut Pro X or Premiere Pro for further editing.
2. Upload your video to YouTube and use the site’s automatic captioning software to create captions for your video. Note: Automated captioning in YouTube is void of punctuation and capitalization, and may misrepresent spoken content due to dialects, ambient noise, or mispronunciations. Take time to review and edit the automated captions – English (Automatic) – and publish a grammatically correct and 100% accurate closed captions file.
3. Manually create your own closed captions file, using a simple text editor (TextEdit for Mac or Notepad for Windows). Upload your file to an online sharing site such as Vimeo or YouTube; or upload to a server and use a popular web player such as JWPlayer to render closed captions or subtitles in the video display. Note: Your VTT files should be saved using UTF8 encoding in order to correctly display special characters.
4. Outsource transcription and captioning to a professional company such as Rev.com. The company charges $1 per minute, guarantees a 98% accuracy rate or higher for text and timing, and a 24 to 48 hour turnaround for FCC and ADA compliant CC files.

Whether you choose to create your CC file in house or outsource to a professional company, closed captioning serves as a useful learning aid in helping students of all abilities with comprehension, engagement, and the retention of course content.

Written by Kate Lee, Senior Media Producer