First off, they have a department dedicated to Accessibility Technology that works with a Disability Office that supports students who need accommodations. This department’s sole mission is to integrate technology in an accessible way. How cool is that?
This unit has a nice, thorough website with lots of good information including DIY support.
For DIY captioning, their go-to tools include editing the auto-capture in YouTube or Amara. One cool thing about Amara is that you can set things up so that subtitles can be public or crowd sourced. Language classes could provide subtitles for other class topics. Amara says, “For example, the band OK Go used the Public Editor to have their fans subtitle their videos into many different languages!”
This got me thinking, there may not be a need to caption recordings from a lecture since the recordings may only be watched soon after they are posted or maybe throughout the semester, but as a student wouldn’t the act of captioning be an interesting way to study and put to memory the conversation that happened in class? It probably isn’t sustainable for a single student to do in a semester and it might be too overwhelming, but it also might be a good way to study.
Interesting use of captions for a music-only video where the captions are used to description the progression of what the music is doing to drive emotion.
Fast forward to 0:45
It could probably have been expanded with more captions (like at 0:17, 0:31, etc.)
Here’s another example of the same video with audio descriptions incorporated into the video
Audio Descriptions — this is where the conversation started to get complicated for me. Not necessarily the process for creating an audio description, but what to do with it after you have the file.
Apparently, current browser’s aren’t able to read/play the files yet, so UW created a player.
Able Player is a fully accessible cross-browser media player. It uses the HTML5 <audio> or <video> element for browsers that support them, and (optionally) the JW Player as a fallback for those that don’t.
Examples and more information using the Able Player
Captioning Lecture Capture Videos: A Promising Teaching Practice
Captions: Improving Access to Postsecondary Education
DIY for caption and descriptions: NCAM – CADET (Caption and Description Editing Tool)
Finally – a YouTube Caption Auditor for YouTube Channels – open course through GitHub
Webinar Recording and Slides (along with test transcript, of course!)
