Accurate and timely captioning for recorded lectures and educational video content is crucial to students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. A challenge faced by colleges and universities is establishing a work flow for getting the content from the professors to the captioners and back to the students who depend on captions for accessibility.
Why Can’t CART Captioners Do This?
Schools hire Communication Access Real-Time Captioners to provide accurate realtime captions for their students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. If these captioners are experts on captioning, why can’t they caption the school’s videos?
Realtime live captioning and post-production captioning are very different processes, and most individual captioners are highly skilled at turning the spoken word into the written word at astonishing speeds. However, few realtime captioners own the software to create synchronized caption files for videos.
Spoiler alert: CaptionTools works with CART Captioners!
Platform Integration
Most colleges and universities use education platforms for delivering their video content. While most of these platforms support captions, the captions are often created using automatic speech recognition, which is not accurate enough to provide meaningful access.
Many deaf students have CART providers or realtime captioners who provide captioning during live classes. These live classes are often recorded and archived for on-demand viewing. It would be best for all students if the archived videos could be captioned using the more accurate CART “transcripts” that are edited and spell-checked by the captioners, rather than simply saving the auto captions from the platform. Unfortunately for the students, it’s not easy to correct the auto captions or replace them.
While many video caption providers have programmed APIs that integrate with the platforms, most of those companies won’t work with the school’s CART Captioners.
Speed Matters
While some professors produce an entire series of recorded lectures in advance of a course, many record lectures throughout the semester. This can present a challenge for getting the video content captioned in a timely manner,
In addition, there are many ways that instructors record and export videos. Unexpected recording issues may arise. For example, if a PowerPoint presentation contains embedded audio files, those audio files may be missing from a video created from that presentation, leaving large gaps of silence in the video. Other methods of recording videos use a variable frame rate, which makes it impossible for captions to stay in sync with the audio.
These and other issues are usually identified on a case-by-case basis, causing delays. If they can be avoided, it streamlines the captioning process.
Balancing Speed, Quality, Budget
Providing quality accessibility in a timely manner without killing the budget. Isn’t that the goal?
If a school hires real-time captioners, shouldn’t those caption files be repurposed to caption the videos? Should disability services personnel be able to streamline the captioning process for their students without being IT specialists?
CaptionTools Can Help
CaptionTools is an online captioning platform that was created by realtime captioners. CaptionTools works with schools directly, and CaptionTools will work with CART Captioners at a discounted rate so that they can provide these much-needed services for their clients.
CaptionTools makes it possible to:
- Edit realtime captions
- Edit auto speech recognition captions
- Align transcripts and videos to create captioned video
- Create log-ins and child accounts for all users
Let us know about your pain points. Whether you’re a school needing a full-service solution, you want self-service, or you’d like someone to work with your existing realtime captioners, we can make that happen.
If you’re a CART captioner, talk to us today. We have great referrals from other captioners, and we’d love to work with you.
CaptionTools.com – if it involves captioning, we have a tool for that!