Captioning Guidelines and Best Practices
Applies to the following areas:
|
|
Overview
Captions are more than text versions of audio dialogue and sound. They are a practical solution that can be added to a prerecorded video or even a live video in real time. Providing this text ensures your content is accessible to more people.
Captions are essential and help the following:
- Deaf and hard-of-hearing people
- Non-native language speakers
- People with learning disabilities
- Anyone in a noisy environment
UAGC Accuracy for Captions
When considering what multimedia to include in your content, look for the following and plan to ensure that you follow the UAGC policy for captioning.
- External videos require captioning and must meet the following criteria:
- Captioning cannot omit any words (unless those words are on screen).
- Captioning must have punctuation and appropriate capitalization.
- Captioning can have up to 2 spelling or punctuation errors. (Errors may not be present in words that are critical to understanding the content).
- Auto captioning via YouTube and other commonly used video platforms commonly contains errors and will not meet all the criteria. As automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content, you should always review automatic captions to ensure proper transcription.
Best Practices
Captions generated by artificial intelligence (AI) provide varying degrees of accuracy. To ensure compliance with UAGC policy, review all captions in your video. Videos posted to YouTube need the author or video owner to review and edit the video captions to ensure UAGC External Video policy. This can be completed on YouTube, and please note that YouTube uses the term Subtitles in the menu area in YouTube Studio. For directions on how the video owner can add and edit YouTube autogenerated subtitles and captions, please refer to the YouTube help section, Add subtitles & captions.
UAGC faculty, please use the Jira ticketing system for external video accessibility reviews.
It is important that the captions are
- Synchronized and appears at approximately the same time as the audio is delivered.
- Equivalent and equal in content to the audio, including speaker identification and sound effects.
- Accessible and readily available to those who need or want them.
The Difference Between Open and Closed Captioning
Open captions cannot be turned off. They are set into the video file and are always visible when the video plays. Closed captions are optional and can be turned off or on by the user.
When to Provide Live Captions
Live captions convert audio dialogue and sound into text that appears on a video in real time. Examples of live captioning are meetings, seminars, and events. Zoom offers automatically generated transcripts and captioning.
For steps on how to edit or enable live captions, check out the following links:
Steps to Editing YouTube Captions
Steps to Enable Teams Live Captions
Steps to Enable Zoom Live Captions
WCAG 2.1 Success Criteria
The issues described on this page map to the following success criteria in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1:
- 1.2 Time-based Media (Level A)
- 1.2.1 Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded) (Level A)
- 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) (Level A)
- 1.2.3 Audio Descriptions or Media Alternative (Prerecorded) (Level A)
- 1.2.4 Captions (Live) (Level AA)
- 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded) (Level AA)
- 1.2.6 Sign Language (Prerecorded) (Level AAA)
- 1.2.7 Extended Audio Description (Prerecorded) (Level AAA)
- 1.2.8 Media Alternative (Prerecorded) (Level AAA)
- 1.2.9 Audio-only (Live) (Level AAA)