Captions and Transcripts

In 2019, the Accessibility Leadership Coordinating Group (ALCG) was formed to create a five-phase holistic accessibility plan that guides our approach to accessibility across all Penn State campuses. The group consists of accessibility leaders from World Campus, Student Disability Services, the Libraries, and IT. In 2022, they published the Captioning Decision Tree and Workflow Links to an external site., which states (among other things) that for newly developed courses, all reusable course videos, regardless of source, need accurate captions. Captions benefit all students and increase engagement and retention Links to an external site. in addition to being more accessible.

What is done for you

In-House Videos Captioned in Production

For all video and audio projects, our multimedia specialists will work with our vendor (3Play Media) to create and integrate captions and transcripts in courses. These transcripts are very high quality, but they may need some minor edits.

• Insert speaker names: The speaker or speakers will most likely be labeled Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on. Those should be replaced with the person's correct name, if possible; use the whole name and title (if known) for the first instance and only the last name after that. If no name is given, put in a title, such as NARRATOR or INTERVIEWER. Names should be in all caps and separated from the text by a colon.

  Example
  PROFESSOR JOHN SMITH: Welcome to the course.

• Replace [INAUDIBLE] with the correct text: You may see "[INAUDIBLE]" in a transcript. Do your best to find out what should go there and replace that with the actual text.
• Insert a blank line between speakers: Insert a blank line between one paragraph of speech (with its associated speaker) and the next. Transcript files have natural paragraph breaks and these can be preserved by copying and pasting the text into design view in Canvas or Evolution.
• Create one transcript, even for "chunked" videos: Some courses include chunked videos, in which content appears in multiple brief segments. In those cases, each chunk will have its own transcript, but those would ideally be combined into one transcript with headings for each segment in <h> tags. You might also use anchor tags in the transcript to make it easier to find relevant sections.

Third-Party Videos with Accurate Captions

Many videos already have accurate captions. Examples include YouTube videos with English captions (not auto-generated), TED Talks, LinkedInLearning videos, and Swank videos. If you choose a video with accurate captions, no additional work is needed.

What you need to do

Videos without Captions 

Seek copyright permission Links to an external site. or purchase the media so that we can host the video and provide accurate captions. A multimedia specialist can guide you through this process. If you are unable to get copyright permission, please work with your multimedia or accessibility consultant to get advice on next steps. 

If the video does not have accurate captions and it is a YouTube video, we can link the video in Kaltura and have it professionally captioned without copyright permission; however, the video will still be streamed from YouTube so it is not as stable as our in-house content because we are dependent on the host continuing to stream it.

If you need them, instructions for embedding videos and adding transcripts Links to an external site. can be found in WCLD 101.

Audio Files

All audio files need to have a transcript. Our multimedia team will generate these if the files are developed in-house. If you choose third-party audio files, choose ones that already have transcripts or work with a multimedia specialist to get a transcript created.

 

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