1. Closed Captioning: Your Guide to Technology and Accessibility
Shannon Cowling, Assistant Director Accessible Communication and Media
Kent State University

2. What are Captions?
“Captioning is the process of converting the audio content of a television broadcast, webcast, film, video, CD-ROM, DVD, live event, and other productions into text and displaying the text on a screen or monitor. Captions not only display words as the textual equivalent of spoken dialogue or narration, but they also include speaker identification, sound effects, and music description.” What are they, really? Who here is coordinating cc?
Based on definition in the Described and Captioned Media Program

3. Session Overview Goals for today’s session:
Understand captioning best practices and basic technical terms
Identify campus partnerships and resources, captioning vendors, and budgetary challenges
Compare current workflow to suggested workflow
Caption

4. Closed captioning Why caption? How does it actually work?
How does it actually work?
Technology requirements
Image retrieved from

5. Terminology

6. Terms to know Closed captioned Decoder Offline captioning
Open-captioned
Subtitle
Transcription
Timecode 

7. Microsoft / Windows Media
Terms continued
Captions vs. Transcript
Captionist vs. Transcriber
Post-Production vs. Live Captions
Closed Caption Formats
DFXP
Flash players
SRT
YouTube and web media
WebVTT
HTML5
SAMI
Microsoft / Windows Media QT
QuickText / QuickTime

8. Best Practices

9. Quality Synchronized and appear the same time the audio is delivered
Equivalent – meaning and intention is preserved
Accurate
Consistent and clear
Readable
Captioning Key

10. Best practices Case Mixed case preferred CAPITAL LETTERS imply? Font
Sans serif
Proportionally spaced
Translucent box
Two lines
Left justified
Lines should not exceed 32 characters
Sentence break – at a logical point or pause

11. Examples Appropriate Inappropriate Seth pick up his black cat.
Seth picked up his
black cat.
Lila scooted under the bed.
Darnell and Tameka Johnson are at meeting.
In seconds she arrived, and he ordered a drink.
She suspected her
face said it all.
Appropriate
Seth pick up his black cat.
Lila scooted under the bed.
Darnell and Tameka Johnson are at the meeting.
In seconds she arrived, and he ordered a drink
She suspected her face
said it all.

12. Example
YouTube
If you remember anything from today……

13. How?

14. Process (In-House) Quality control & supervision Scalability
Verbatim transcript
Include speaker ID and sound effects
Divide the transcript into 32 characters with no more than 2 lines of text
Use captioning software to add the time codes and synch
Import the captioning file into the video
Consider where the video is housed
Quality control & supervision
Scalability

15. Process (Outsourcing)
Cost
Reputation
Turnaround time
Workflow & compatibility with current software
How do you coordinate services?
Current workflow
Suggested workflow

16. Considerations Campus Partnerships - Networking Budget Time Staffing
Face-to-face and online courses
Implementation
Technology
Stakeholders
Education

17. Alternatives – Not recommended
Speech recognition
You get what you pay for
Transcripts only
Not captioning

18. Let’s Caption

19. Questions?
Contact me at
Connect on social media.

20. References & Resources
3 Play Media -
Captioning Key -
Further explanation and examples of captioning may be found at:
Cielo
Cross, J. and Hornsby, A. (ND). The Complete Guide to Closed Captioning and Educational Video Accessibility. Retrieved from
Movie Captioner -
NBC Learn -
Pepnet 2 -