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Captioning Guide

A Guide for Captioning Video

Why is this important?

Captions are important because they help provide access to your video content for individuals with hearing impairments in compliance with federal regulations, MSU policy, and best practices for video design. Captioning your media also creates greater visibility in search engines and creates greater student comprehension of the material covered in the video.

There are a number of benefits to hosting your media content in MediaSpace including free hosting, unlimited storage, and ease of integration with D2L. While these are important, another important benefit to consider is the captioning services that can be accessed through MediaSpace.

All MSU faculty, staff, and students can order machine captions for your media content hosted on MediaSpace. These captions are free and unlimited and usually take less than 30 minutes to be created for you, and MediaSpace has an editor for you to use as well.

Machine Captions

Machine captions are free, unlimited, and can be ordered on all of your media content hosted in MediaSpace. MediaSpace automatically will generate captioning that is around 70-80% accurate, dependent upon the quality of the audio. With this in mind, we recommend that you check the accuracy of your captions and correct any inaccuracies using the captions editor before making them available to your viewers.

Ordering Captions

If your time is limited, you may prefer to purchase human-created captions for your media content. This is a paid service and costs as low as $1.25 per minute of captioned video, and requires little technical expertise and time to complete. These captions are guaranteed 99% accurate, and will give you peace of mind that your captions are presented accurately. In most cases, captions will be added to your video within 24-72 hours

There are two ways to order human-created captions for your media content:

  1. Self-Service: You can order captions for all of your media content hosted in MediaSpace using the Order MediaSpace Captions form. You will need an account number to complete this order, and your captions will be added to your MediaSpace content automatically once they are complete.
  2. Request help with captioning: If you would like assistance in ordering captions for your media content, or have media hosted outside of MediaSpace, use the Captioning Request Form. You will need an account number to complete this order, and there is no guarantee that captions can be created for content hosted outside of MediaSpace (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, etc). You will not be billed for content that cannot be captioned.

There are also ways of creating your own captions using software and services that you already use. For more information, check out the tutorial on creating your own captions.

Beyond Captions

Captions are only the first step of meeting the WCAG 2.0. Altogether there are nine specific audio/video accessibility guidelines. To get started looking at them see:

For questions, email us at webaccess@msu.edu.

 

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