Why Captions?
Accurate video and audio captions are one of the most important means of ensuring that all of your students have access to your course content. In addition to the hearing impaired, video captions are helpful to many different groups: those who understand better when presented with written information, those who do not have a quiet environment to watch the video, those who are watching a video in their non-native language, when the speaker has an unfamiliar accent, and so on.
Ensuring that the videos that you use in your course are captioned is easy once you take the time to learn about the variety of captioning tools and options that SRJC and the CCC system have provided.
What Are Quality Captions?
You can tell that a video's captions are high-quality if they have the following characteristics:
- Accurate punctuation & capitalization
- No more than two lines of text per caption
- Captions are synchronized with the audio
- Different speakers are identified
- Readable
Is it Okay if I just use auto-captions?
In many cases, auto-captions are sufficient. For example, the auto-captions from Canvas Studio are generally high-quality. However, auto-captions always need to be checked by the instructor for accuracy. Auto-captions are likely not sufficient when:
- The video covers highly-technical information
- The speaker has an accent that may be difficult for auto-captioning tools to recognize
Captioning Options
There several different workflows that Distance Education recommends for captioning video based on the length of the video, the video creation platform you prefer, and whether the video was made by you or a third-party.
For shorter videos, the easiest method to caption them is to use the auto-captions provided by Canvas Studio and then edit them yourself. Once you are accustomed to this workflow, it will only take you a few minutes to correct the captions on a short video and embed the video into your course. 
