Speaker 1: As teachers, we're really now entering in a time where our content's available in so many different ways, on so many different platforms. And we are not servicing so many of our students if we're not increasing accessibility. And captioning is one of the most important ways that we can be doing that. And the fact that we now have the technological tools to do it is, if we don't, we're missing out on a huge opportunity. And we're actually missing out on what I would see as one of the missions of the university, to increase access.

Speaker 2: Captions are a benefit for people who miss information. It's an ability to go back and catch up with the information that's being presented. If there's a new word that a person's never seen before, they can see it on the captioning.

Speaker 3: I do use captions on my own, sometimes in louder environments where it's hard to hear, or when I'm not used to some sort of dialect or lingo people are using.

Speaker 4: I think this has to be captioned so that it's more accessible to everyone. So it's not just geared towards deaf or hard of hearing people, but it can be helpful for international students.

Speaker 5: For professors who are considering captioning their courses, I highly encourage it, because it provides accessibility to more students than you may imagine.

Speaker 6: Well, captioning makes video accessible for people who can't hear the audio. So somebody who's deaf or hard of hearing, or somebody who's situationally hearing impaired, and for whatever reason, they're in a loud environment or they're in an environment where they can't turn up the audio and don't have access to speakers, then they benefit from captions.

Speaker 7: If they're at a coffee shop or it's late at night in their dorm and they need to keep, basically, the sound down because their roommate's sleeping, then if you have captioning, it makes still the lecture materials very available and easy for students to access them in those types of environments.

Speaker 8: As a certified sign language interpreter, I've had a unique experience in that I've seen some of the frustrations that deaf people may have when unable to access basic communication.

Speaker 2: Captions are important because when you get into a classroom and the teacher is presenting, say, a videotape, I'll have an interpreter in the classroom. I have to look at the interpreter and look at the screen at the same time to get the information. It's important for my education to be able to access information.

Speaker 7: There's a wide variety of students that benefit from captioning. Issues of accessibility, obviously, but also for students for whom English isn't their primary language. It really makes the material more accessible to them. And, frankly, for students who, because I teach chemistry and science instruction, you use a lot of technical language, so it gives students the ability to kind of look at words where they've heard them. They can actually see them as well and start to make connections between what they're hearing and what the word actually is. And so it's beneficial in that regard as well.

Speaker 9: Seeing technical words and captioning is very beneficial because if I have an ASL interpreter signing a really big chemistry word, they're going to think I've spelled it really fast and I'm not going to know how it's spelled.

Speaker 8: Lecture Capture allows instructors and even students and full-time staff the ability to download software onto their computer and record their screen while also recording with a camera and their audio to deliver the educational content that shows the screen and also shows you in a picture-in-picture to deliver content in a more interactive way.

Speaker 5: With the captioners, I get the material back and I'm able to search through the material for keywords.

Speaker 8: Within the Lecture Capture system that the University of Washington offers, there is the ability to do a keyword search of the video that you're watching. In fact, you can do a keyword search of all the videos within your account, which we think is a pretty powerful feature because the search will actually search against the transcript that is created by the caption vendor. So essentially what that means is every word that is recorded is now able to be searched upon.

Speaker 1: The search function with captioning is just something we haven't even really started to incorporate as lecturers, but it's what we've always wanted, right? So let's say you've got a student preparing for the test. They're looking at their notes. They see this concept and they remember faintly something from the lecture when they were sitting in the lecture hall. With the search function, what you've done is created the class as a searchable database. And so in that case, what they're using that lecture for is, you know, as a searchable way of engaging and making connections between concepts, connections that as a lecturer you would want them to make, or maybe even as a teacher you wouldn't even guess that they would make.

Speaker 6: Every video that's uploaded to YouTube gets captioned automatically, and that's machine-generated captions. So the science isn't great at this point. It's getting better. Sometimes it produces an accurate enough transcript or accurate enough captions that you can go in and edit those captions, and it doesn't take very long to do that if it just has a few mistakes here and there. To caption video on YouTube, you have to be the owner of the video, and then you can edit the automatic captions that YouTube creates, or you can upload captions that you create. But you do have to be the owner of the video in order to do that. If people want to create their own captions, do their own captioning, then there are a variety of tools that support that. They can do that for free using various tools that are available, either software that they can download or free tools that are available on the Web. Captions open up so many possibilities because if you think about how much video is being cranked out now, a lot of the world's information is now in video form. And with captions, we have access to all that's being said within those videos. So there's data galore, and it's time-synced data. So that opens up all sorts of possibilities for new research or just different ways of interacting with information.

Speaker 7: The feedback I've gotten about captioning has just been remarkable, in particular for students for whom English is not their primary language. They just absolutely love it. And on my student evaluation forms that I get, that comes out loud and clear that they really appreciate captioning because it just makes the material more accessible.

Speaker 2: This video presentation was created with funding from UW Information Technology at the University of Washington. Copyright 2014, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.