10.2 Video and Multimedia Accessibility
All course videos and multimedia must be captioned with accurate captions. Consider using Canvas Studio or Microsoft Stream to generate captions. Edit captions afterward as necessary, so the captions are a true reflection of the video’s content.
Keep videos to less than 5 minutes. Read from a transcript to help you stay on point. Make sure to speak about what is on the screen so that vision impaired students know what is there.
Points: 3 (Essential)
QM Alignment: 8.5, 8.6
Overview
Video and multimedia are not accessible if there are not accurate captions or a transcript.
Accessible Video
-
Player controls to stop, pause, mute, or adjust volume.
-
Autoplay control method.
-
Captions / transcripts
Accessible Media
-
Description of Visual Information
-
Low Background Noise
-
Accessible media players
-
Synchronized captions, transcripts
-
Sign Language
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I just use automatically generated video captions?
- Auto-generated captions (such as in Canvas Studio or YouTube videos) are a good starting point, but often are not sufficient, as they lack proper punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, especially for math and technical terms. Check your captions for accuracy, and you can edit the captions in-place, or else copy the captions to a file that you can edit and link to.
- Do the captions have to be 100% accurate?
- Yes, the text of the captions or transcript must accurately convey the meaning in the video or multimedia. This includes an accurate textual representation of any words used.
- U.S. laws also require video captions to be accurate, and the Department of Justice recently issued guidance for web accessibility. A student’s learning or comprehension of a video should not be impaired due to inaccurate captions.
- Does that include accurate punctuation in the captions or transcript?
- Changing punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence, so yes, the punctuation in the captions or transcript needs to be accurate. Often, automatically generated captions and transcripts do not have correct punctuation, so you will need to edit them for corrections. If it is a YouTube video with captions you cannot edit, then copy and paste the YouTube transcript into a document that you can edit. Upload and link to that file underneath your embedded video.
Tips
- Captioning
- See the Canvas Studio Guide for information about how to request and edit captions for a video file.
- For YouTube: download captions, use automatic captions & how to edit captions. It may be easier to use YouTube Transcript site to fetch and copy the transcript of a YouTube video.
- How to edit the captions in recorded Microsoft Teams meetings, stored in Microsoft Streams
- Correcting Video Transcripts
- There are some third party tools that may do a better job at generating more accurate captions, such as OpenAI’s Whisper or Otter.ai.
- Another tip is to try Bing Chat, ChatGPT, or a similar generative AI tool to fix the punctuation and other issues in a transcript, with a prompt such as: Do not change the words of the following transcript, but add missing punctuation, fix misspelled words, remove the line breaks, and remove timestamps: …
- Pedagogical Tips for Videos
- Videos should be short – under 15 minutes – ideally around 5 minutes long. Break up longer videos or lectures into smaller parts.
- Consider adding questions at the beginning or end of your video to help ensure students actually watch and understand it: either by asking thought questions in the video itself, or by embedding the video in the description of a Canvas quiz, or you can insert graded questions in the video itself using Canvas Studio.
- See the “Enhancing Learning from Videos” section at the bottom of standard 3.9 for more pedagogical and technological tips for videos.
Feedback/Errata