How to Write Captions
Best practice guidelines for writing comprehensive and effective captions to make videos accessible.
Why Make Multimedia Accessible?
Videos are increasingly utilized in the classroom. By making videos accessible to a greater audience, we ensure that all participants can access the content being shared. Accessible videos include captions, a transcript, an audio description, and employ an accessible media player.
Provided on this page are several resources on how to make Multimedia accessible. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you have a recommendation or guide request, please reach out to us.
For opportunities to learn more about creating accessible content, consider attending a Proactive Accessibility Certificate Workshop Series.
Making Multimedia Accessible: What Doesn't Work
The following list consists of the most common issues that make multimedia content inaccessible and quick steps for how to avoid them:
- Only providing subtitles; subtitles only transcribe the spoken language therefore some valuable auditory elements are not conveyed
- Instead: provide accurate closed captions to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the video
- Inserting media with Microsoft tools; the built in media players for Microsoft PowerPoint are inaccessible
- Instead: embed videos from accessible media players like YouTube
- Providing inaccurate or auto-generated captions and transcripts; errors in the text-alternative can impede the understandability of multimedia
- Instead: edit captions and transcripts before distributing your content
- Providing transcripts without timestamps; timestamps provide a roadmap to the transcript and related audio
- Instead: provide captions with timestamps at 15 second intervals for shorter videos. For longer videos, timestamps are required at least at the following events:
- Significant change in speaker
- Topic change
- Slide change
- Instead: provide captions with timestamps at 15 second intervals for shorter videos. For longer videos, timestamps are required at least at the following events:
- Displaying visuals in a video with no alternative; visuals in videos need to be given proper support to be understood by students using screen readers
- Instead: explain visuals during recording or retroactively add audio description
Guides for Creating Accessible Multimedia
Create and Edit Captions in Yuja
Yuja is a leader in enterprise video solutions and is a preferred video capturing product.
Create and Edit Captions on YouTube
YouTube is an online video sharing platform and provides auto-generated captions. These captions can often be inaccurate, but can be edited with this guide.
Manage Captions and Transcripts in Microsoft Stream
This guide is dedicated to explaining how you can generate automatic captions in Microsoft Stream.
Create Transcripts using Otter.ai
Otter Voice Meetings Notes is an application that will record and automatically transcribe oral content with a 90% accuracy.
Create Captions Using Amara
Amara is a web-based non-profit project created you to host and create user-subtitle videos.
Dig Deeper with these Additional Resources (external links)
- Visit the Web Accessibility in Mind, Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Description page for more information on supporting multimedia.
- The Described and Captioned Media Program Captioning Key (dcmp.org) website has great guidelines on captioning.
- Visit the General Services Administration’s page on creating 508 Accessible Videos to learn more about creating videos in compliance with Section 508.
- Visit the Web Accessibility Initiative’s page for more resources on Making Audio and Video Media Accessible