Video Transcripts : Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Description

Welcome to Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Description: Taking your Video Accessibility to the Next Level. My name is Anaya Jones.

Chances are, if you’re engaging with this video poster, you’ve made an instructional video before. Videos are a common format for sharing information with our library community - for good reason! Videos can put a friendly face to information and they allow us to show and tell our way through multi-step processes or complex ideas.

Accessible videos aren't created by accident. It’s important to approach your video creation with a plan that prioritizes accessibility.

Is your draft written in easy-to-understand language? Use a tool to determine and lower the lexile or readability level of your script.

Writing in easy-to-read language is helpful for everyone. This includes folks with intellectual disabilities, people who are learning in a second language, and it also allows viewers to focus on what you’re saying, not how you’re saying it.

Is everything that shown visually described verbally? Because you’ll caption your video later, everything said in the video will have a visual or textual counterpart. It's also important that all visual content has an audio counterpart.

You can plan to include an audio description track or include descriptions of what you show in your main audio. For library instructional videos, it's easiest to include this description in your script.

To incorporate audio description into your script, think about what you're showing your viewers. Incorporate concise, contextual descriptions of visual components into your script. These descriptions should serve the same purpose as the visual. You don't need to read slides word-for-word, unless the specific words are important. You do want to talk about everything that is included on your slide.

Do your instructions rely on the physical location of elements, or the senses? If so, expand your instructions to also include another way of finding the element you’re referencing.

Okay, so you complete your review, edit as needed, record your audio, and edit your video. Great job! Now it’s time to caption.Some platforms like YouTube, Panopto and others will automatically caption your videos. These captions can save you a lot of time, but you must correct them.

Auto captions are often called “craptions” because they are notoriously inaccurate. Edit captions to add punctuation and correct any errors.

Here we’re in YouTube’s Video Subtitles editor. This dialog box has three main parts. You’ll edit your captions in the editor on the left, and listen to your video in the player on the right. Under both sections is a timeline of the video. Because I followed my script, I’m going to paste my script into the editor on the left and click [edit] timings above the editor to see the captions with timings. Then I would watch the video through as a final check.

After you edit your captions, you’ll make a transcript. If you used a script, you’re almost done! If you didn’t read closely from a script, click the three vertical dots above the caption editor to export them. Format the exported captions into an easy-to-read transcript.

Format your transcript into small chunks. I usually create at least one paragraph for each slide or distinct idea. If all visuals are described in your audio, a series of paragraphs is great. Often, a simple table with a column for audio and a column for visual components can be helpful. If the video has multiple speakers, be sure to identify them. Host this transcript in HTML and provide a link everywhere the video appears. For example, you can see the transcript for the Sample Vid we just captioned.

I think that’s enough to be getting on with! Please let me know if you have questions.