HUIT's Digital Accessibility Services (DAS) offers guidance to schools and departments looking to add captioning to video resources.
Who benefits from closed captioning?
Captions benefit the deaf and hearing impaired, but they also enhance the experience of those for whom English is a second language, people with learning disabilities, and anyone in a noisy environment.
What makes good captions
To ensure the videos you produce and post at Harvard are accessible, they should have accurate captions that include proper punctuation, speaker identification, and the identification of sounds other than speech. Services like 3Play Media and Rev are excellent resources for providing budget-friendly, high-quality captions with a quick turnaround. Auto-generated captions are not sufficient to meet the accuracy standard of Harvard’s Policy without substantial editing and proofreading for quality assurance.
What are factors to consider when choosing a captioning strategy?
- Transcription accuracy
- Cost
- Time required to caption
- Ease of integration into your video production workflow
Three approaches for captioning videos
| Approach* | Comment |
|---|---|
|
Import video into caption editing tool and manually transcribe or compose. |
Good choice if very short video. |
|
Leverage a speech-to-text tool or import text from a Word document to create a ‘first pass’, then make any needed corrections and synchronize the text with your video. |
Automated (speech-to-text) solutions provide variable degrees of accuracy. This approach works best when the video is of a single person speaking clearly, and with limited noise interference in the background. Accuracy rates drop if there are multiple people with overlapping dialog, if there is background noise in the video, or if specialized terminology is used. |
|
Use a closed captioning service that provides both the captions or transcription and synchronization to your video. |
This fee-for-service approach will provide the greatest accuracy with a minimal use of internal resources. |
* Note: For videos that will be public-facing, the text output must be edited in order to conform to WCAG 2.0 guidelines. For that reason, using a service is highly recommended.
Three categories of tools
- Closed caption services
- Caption editor
- Speech-to-text
1) Closed captioning services
| Vendor | Cost | Accuracy | Turn-around time | Suitable use cases | How to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
very high (99%+) |
Standard: 48 hours Premium: 24 hours |
Preferred Vendor. Use for videos that need high degree of accuracy, such as for a student who needs captioning for a course lecture or videos to be made public. Offers a wide range of services and formats. |
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|
$1.25/min |
Very high (99%+) |
24 hour turnaround if video is 20 minutes or less. |
Used for videos that need high accuracy, such as for a student who needs captioning for a course lecture or videos to be made public. |
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|
On per minute basis |
Very high (99%+) |
24 or 48 hours |
Combination. Can be integrated with video platforms. |
2) Caption editors
| Vendor | Cost | Suitable use cases | How to |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Free |
For DIY caption creation |
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|
Free |
For DIY caption creation. Allows online collaboration. |
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3) Speech-to-text (STT)
| Vendor | Cost | Accuracy | Suitable use cases | How to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Medium-High (80-95%) |
Automated. Can be integrated with video platforms. Has been used by DCE. |
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|
Currently free (while in preview); future costs still to be determined, but current version is $.02/min or less |
Medium-High (80-95%) |
Emphasizes searchability. |
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|
YouTube |
Free |
Low-Medium, but provides tools to edit and correct |
When you don’t need to collaborate to add the captioning. |
FAQs for Harvard Affiliates
Social Media Accessibility Best Practices
Social media accounts at Harvard must make every effort to make the content they share accessible to all audiences. These best practices from Harvard Public Affairs & Communications provide guidance for accessibility on social media in general, and specifically on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.