BALL STATE CAPTIONING POLICY

If you use multimedia in your course, such as video or audio, you have likely wondered about captions and transcripts.

Ball State's captioning policy can be hard to parse, so we asked Jeff Bowers, the university's Caption Writer and CART Provider, to provide easy-to-understand language about captioning and transcripts. The following is Jeff's response:

Instructors should use accurately captioned material when available. Media with video components, which are purchased or otherwise acquired, must be supported with the addition of captioning. Media with audio components, which are purchased or otherwise acquired, must be supported with verbatim transcripts. In these instances, it is the responsibility of third-party vendors to make sure their own materials are accessible. Instructors should check with any vendors they are using to make sure their materials are accessible.

Captioning requires training and experience to achieve the proficiency needed to create ADA-compliant accommodations. For this reason, please do not attempt to caption any of your own materials.

If you have students who need this accommodation in your courses, you will be informed by Disability Services at the beginning of the semester with further instructions. At that time you will be able to submit captioning requests for both your own course materials as well as for media you are using from freely and publicly available sources on the Internet, such as YouTube and Vimeo videos.

HOW TO IDENTIFY A VIDEO WITH ACCURATE CAPTIONS

If you're using media from a publicly available source, such as YouTube, it's likely that media has either computer-generated captions (using a transcription algorithm) or human-generated captions. The gap between these is absolutely huge, though. Computer-generated captions are basically never accessible.

While not all human-generated captions are accessible (ADA-compliant captioning requires training and skill), identifying human-generated captions from computer-generated captions can go a long ways in ensuring multimedia accessibility. Here are a few tips to identify human-generated captions on YouTube and other platforms.

Look for punctuation and capitalization. Most computer-generated captions rarely use punctuation (such as YouTube's algorithm), and those that do often rely on verbal cues like pauses, which don't actually track to the sentence structure. If you read the captions and they either don't use punctuation much or they punctuate in odd spots, then it's highly likely the captions are computer-generated. The same applies for capitalization, as most computer algorithms will rarely capitalize words.
Look for people's names. Caption algorithms are often inaccurate when it comes to people's names, and reading the captions at a spot where someone's name is said is often a quick way to tell if the captions were human-generated or computer-generated.
Watch the entire video. While we have lumped captions here into computer-generated and human-generated, the reality is that many YouTube videos are a hybrid. YouTube creators will use the computer-generated captions, then clean them up after they have been generated. While this is a time-saving method, it doesn't always result in accessible captions. Make sure to watch the entire video and examine the captions, as portions of the video may be accurate while other portions are not.

Quick Recap

Making your course accessible by reducing the barriers to accessing or participating in it helps benefit everyone, regardless of ability.