Enhancing Video Accessibility: Captions, Audio Descriptions, and Best Practices (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The addition of captions to videos makes a significant impact on the viewing experience of your audience. Captions obviously provide support to those that are hard of hearing or deaf, but can also be beneficial to many users. Captions help students with spelling, note-taking, comprehension and clarification. So how can you add captions to your video content? Transcripts are the simplest method of supporting your video content. You can provide a text document to accompany your video with the script written in full. Although many find writing scripts difficult, they can improve the communication of your video and give you the opportunity to revise the language for clarity. You can use tools such as Dictate in Microsoft Word to transcribe text as you speak. Closed captions, often referred to as subtitles, are overlaid onto a video post-production and provide the best accessibility of captioning. Closed captions can be edited for accuracy and can even offer support for multiple languages. You can add automatically transcribed captions to Panopto videos by navigating to the Panopto Video Editor, clicking Captions in the left-hand menu, and then Import Automatic Captions. You'll see time-stamped captions automatically applied to your video and listed in full in the editor. You can now click any caption and edit the text to ensure accuracy. Unfortunately, automatic transcriptions are never perfect and are affected by audio quality, accents, and complex language. Taking the time to improve your audio quality through the use of an external microphone and a quiet recording space will not only improve the video audio, but also the caption quality. Scripts can be helpful here, to both help you speak clearly and to provide text to copy and paste from to improve captions. Captions are not the only method of supporting hard-of-hearing students. A clear, well-lit video of the speaker's face will facilitate lip-reading, improving engagement with your video. Sit facing the light source, preferably daylight, with the camera at eye level for a clear picture. Creating videos with Panopto allows for the recording of your screen and camera as two separate video streams, which students can choose to switch between when watching. To achieve the highest standard of accessible videos, you may want to consider audio descriptions. Audio descriptions prove a more technically demanding feature than captioning and can be difficult to implement. You could consider the experience of blind or visually impaired viewers when creating your videos and follow this consideration into the language you use when recording. Try closing your eyes and listening to the video. How can you use the language enhance the experience for those that can't see the screen? For example, a screen-reading tutorial on how to use Panopto might include a voiceover saying click here in this menu and then here and then this button. This could easily be improved to state click captions in the left-hand menu, then the import captions drop-down arrow, then import automatic captions. Using descriptive language will support all of your viewers, not just those with visual impairments. The delivery of videos to your audience can impact how accessible the content is. You should always try to favour a streaming service rather than asking students to download the full video file. Videos tend to be large files which can take a long time to download and take up limited storage space on devices. A mobile-friendly streaming platform such as Panopto or Microsoft Streams function in a similar way to YouTube but allow you much more control over viewer permissions of your content. Panopto features additional learning tools such as variable playback speed, multiple video feeds, shared and private notes and quizzing tools, making it the university's recommended video platform. When embedding videos, avoid autoplay on video and audio content. Where possible, it's always best to provide controls to stop, pause or hide any audio or videos.