Speaker 1: Welcome to our Captioning Accessibility Workshop. Today we're going to cover what captions are, captioning requirements, frequently asked questions about captioning, and where to contact third-party captioning vendors. What are captions? Captions are an accurate text representation of a video's audio content. In order for your captions to be compliant and fully accessible, they must match the audio exactly, they need to be accurate, which includes accounting for correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Your captions need to be in sync with your audio, and you'll need to make sure that your caption file has important non-dialogue sounds, like doors slamming and phones ringing. There's a difference between captions and subtitles, but you might prefer the terms used interchangeably. Captions are a text representation of the audio content, and are going to be presented in the same language as the audio content. So, for example, I'm speaking English in this presentation, so my caption file will also be in English. Subtitles are a translation of the audio content, so they will be presented in the language that is different from the audio of a video. Captions are required for accessibility compliance, but subtitles are not. There's also a difference between closed and open captions. Closed captions are the captions that you can turn on or off, and they have a lot of benefit for end users, especially in an online setting like YouTube or Vimeo. These captions can be translated, and their appearance can be changed based on what an end user thinks is most helpful. They can be searched because they are a text file. In comparison, open captions are the burned-in captions that you might see. These captions are always on screen, but they don't have the ability to be turned on or off or modified by end users. Our team always recommends adding a closed caption file even if you have an open caption file, because they are easier for users to change based on their individual preferences. What are the differences between live captions and pre-recorded captions? Live captions are what you're going to see with any live event. These captions are written in real time by a transcriptionist, and they are making these captions very quickly. Because of this, there are typically some errors in spelling, accuracy, punctuation, and clarity, and they're going to be delayed with the audio. A telltale sign that captions are built for a live event is that they are in all caps. What most of us are going to be working with are pre-recorded captions, which means that the caption files are added after the video itself has been made. For these, it is required that they are fully accurate and they are in sync with the audio. Because live captions have errors and are not in sync, they cannot be used for pre-recorded captions. When writing your captions, it's also very important that you include speaker identifications and let your audience know who is talking. It is required that you add these in when it is not clear who is speaking, when the speaker is off-screen, or when a new person starts speaking. When in doubt on if you should add a speaker ID, just go ahead and put it in. Here are some examples of speaker IDs from Berklee videos. The standard way to incorporate these is to add the speaker's name in all caps and then add a colon. If you don't know a speaker's name, you can describe them with another identifier. Some examples are student, audience member, and professor. There are lots of these that you can use. It's best practice to steer away from gendered language to describe people and to add a numerical if there is more than one unidentified speaker. Auto captions are not accurate enough to be considered accessible. In fact, videos with auto captions are seen as not having a caption file at all. These captions are AI generated and are really helpful in getting started in the captioning process because they can do most of the heavy lifting for us, but they do need quite a bit of editing from a real person to make sure that they are correct. At best, auto captions are only going to be about 70% accurate, and that's if the audio quality is perfect, which most videos are not. Auto captions don't add punctuation, don't capitalize words correctly, don't identify non-audio dialogue, and make a lot of mistakes with technical terminology. For these reasons, all videos need an edited caption file to ensure that they meet accessibility requirements. When you're building your captions, it's important to add in important background sounds that you might hear. This is any sound that is important for your audience to understand the context of what is going on. This can include dogs barking, bells chiming, or music playing. You'll need to describe your sounds and then add them into your captions with brackets or parentheses. Captioning music is a little different. If it's just instrumental music, you can simply add music in brackets, like what's on the lower right of the screen. But if your music is lyrics, it is best practice to add a music note around the lyrics so anyone watching knows that it is part of a song. Sometimes you'll have a video with no audio at all, and that's perfectly fine. But you'll still need to add a caption file so your audience knows that there's no sound involved. This can be as simple as adding brackets with no sound written inside. What do you do with all the ums and ahs that come in a caption file? This is the one exception to the verbatim rule. You're allowed to clean up a caption file and remove filler words if it is needed to improve the readability of your captions. You still must absolutely maintain the message of your audio. This does not mean you can summarize or remove content, but you can clean up those extra ums that are in your file. Your caption file needs to be the same language as the audio. If your audio is in English, your caption file should also be in English. If your audio is in Spanish, then your caption file should also be in Spanish. In this example, a video has been produced with the same content in both English and Spanish. The English-language video is captioned in English, and the Spanish-language video is captioned in Spanish. If your department or unit has the resources to outsource your captioning, you can hire a third-party vendor. Our department recommends using 3Play Media for post-reported captioning and Aberdeen for live captioning. We also have a page on our site listing our recommended third-party accessibility vendors. You are not required to use these services to caption your files, but they can be helpful. Here are some additional captioning resources, including a link to our departmental site, the DCMP standards, and the WCAG standards for pre-recorded audio.