Captioning

Doing Your Own Captioning

Canvas Studio, YouTube, ConferZoom, and 3C Media all have captioning functionality that can be used to make your instructional media accessible to students. We'll cover these in more detail on the individual pages for those tools.

 

Captioning in Canvas Studio

Canvas Studio has an automated captioning process which transcribes and syncs the captions automatically for you, and can be used as an excellent starting point. You can edit the machine-generated captions inside Canvas Studio (for your own videos) to make them more accurate. If you have a text transcript of the audio, you can upload the transcript file, and the syncing process of a manually generated transcript (text file) is done automatically by Canvas Studio.

Canvas Studio allows instructors to easily incorporate closed captioning to their recorded content to make all recorded content accessible to students, and to satisfy the DE video captioning guidelines. With tools like Canvas Studio's ability to generate closed captions automatically with 85% accuracy will greatly aid in making recorded lectures and other content easier to transcribe and share among your students.

To find out more about the Canvas Studio captioning features, you can follow this guide from Canvas: How to use Canvas Studio Captioning

More Captioning Support:

YouTube captions do not automatically transfer into Canvas Studio.  If you own the YouTube video, you can, however, easily and quickly download your YouTube captions and upload them into Canvas Studio. 

Here’s a video showing how to do that: How to add YouTube Captions to Canvas Studio

 

Things get a little difficult if you need to transfer captions for a YouTube video that you do not own. 

It can be done and here’s a video showing one way to do it: How to add captions to a video you do not own, using Canvas Studio

 

Captioning in YouTube

YouTube has an automated captioning process which transcribes and syncs the captions automatically for you, and can be used as an excellent starting point. You can edit the machine-generated captions inside YouTube (for your own videos) to make them more accurate. If you have a text transcript of the audio, you can upload the transcript file, and the syncing process of a manually generated transcript (text file) is done automatically by YouTube. Check out the YouTube page for more specific captioning tutorials.

 

Captioning with Zoom

Automatically transcribe the audio of a meeting or class when you record to the Cloud. After the recording is processed and the transcript file is created, you have three options:

• Display the transcript text within the video, similar to a closed caption display.
• Open the text file in the chat window to read while viewing the recording.
• Download the text file (.VTT format) to your desktop and share as a document.

Easily edit the text to change words, or add capitalization and punctuation not captured in the transcript. Editing will reflect in the video display, the chat window, and the document (.VTT) file. A search function is available to seek out specific text as well as time stamps to indicate when a portion of the text was recorded.

To learn more about captioning with ConferZoom you can follow their Audio Transcript Page.

To learn more about live captioning a Zoom Meeting you can watch this video tutorial.

Here is a video guide from Zoom that goes over how to create captioned videos.

 

Captioning with 3C Media

The DECT Captioning Grant offers funding to faculty, staff, and administrators of the CCC's for captioning of educational media. 3C Media Solutions (TechConnect Cloud) is in partnership with DECT  and provides the service thru the 3C Media Solutions’ (TechConnect Cloud) website. To request captions for your video or audio file thru 3C Media Solutions (TechConnect Cloud), simply follow these steps once you have an 3C Media account:

1. From your "My Media" tab, click the "Details & Options" link to the right of the media you want captions for
   Under "Tools"
2. click on "Submit the Media for Captioning"
3. Fill out and submit the form

How to Upload into 3CMedia (12:35): https://www.3cmediasolutions.org/node/19487

The DECT Grant

Obviously, the easiest way to solve this issue is to have a professional provider do the captioning for you! 

Indeed, California Community College faculty have access to the Distance Education Captioning and Transcription (DECT) grant funds for this purpose. If you would like to take advantage of the DECT Grant funds for captioning your videos, please submit the Request for Captioning Form to the SDCCD Online Learning Pathways. In the event, however, that you do not qualify for these funds (not a California Community College faculty member), funds run short, or you simply desire the quick response, convenience and flexibility of captioning your own videos, you can do this yourself.

In a memo released from the CCC Chancellor's Office there has been a 450% increase of captioning requests from across the state. Given the scale of need and assistance the DECT grant fund has been amended to prioritize and support students with documented Academic Accommodation Plans ("AAP") who require captioning services. Academic Accommodation Plans can be requested from contacting your campus DSP&S Office.

Effective November 1, 2020, each request for captions shall be accompanied by the requester’s certification that the request is for a student with an approved accommodation, as documented in his/her AAP. Colleges shall ensure all students needing accommodations are documented in their AAPs in order to comply with regulatory requirements and maximize state level financial resources. The priorities of incoming captioning requests are listed below:

1. All real-time captioning requests for classes and all closed caption requests for videos greater than thirty minutes in duration, if meeting the requirements described above, will be processed as requested.
2. All videos requesting Captions from the DECT Grant must be 30-minutes or longer in length.
3. All closed caption requests for videos less than thirty minutes in duration, if meeting the requirements described above, will be processed as auto-caption videos. Relevant faculty/staff should edit them for accuracy as needed.
4. All closed caption requests for videos that do not have a certification of current need for accommodation but would like to be accessible for potential future students with disabilities will be processed as lowest priority auto-caption videos. Relevant faculty/staff should edit them for accuracy as needed.
5. All other captioning requests will be the sole responsibility of colleges to fund directly through college-level resources.