Do you have audio or video material on the web or use it in your courses? Are these materials captioned? The MediaHub can help coordinate your captioning needs.
Why Caption?
Many reasons exist for captioning including:
Benefits the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
People who are deaf or hard of hearing are not able to directly access auditory information. Captioning provides a lifeline by displaying audio content on screen as synchronized text.
A #captionTHIS day video demonstrates the need for captioning.
A is available.transcript of the video
Captions are Good Universal Design
Captions are beneficial to a wide variety of people and situations. They:
- improve comprehension.
- can be read by people who benefit from seeing and hearing words together such as people with certain learning disabilities, or visual learners, or English language learners.
- provide access where sound isn't allowed, in situations, users may not be able to access audio on their computers, such as labs without speakers.
- compensate for noisy backgrounds or for poor audio quality.
- clarify when the language is heavily accented.
- make words clearer when a person is unfamiliar with the subject terminology.
- are used by couples to keep peace in the bedroom (when one wants to roll over to sleep and the other wants to continue watching a video.)
- enable multitasking i.e., watching a video while answering the phone.
- are searchable, allowing people to search media files for a topic of interest.
Complies with University Policy
The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG), level AA, serve as the Web accessibility standard for the University of Minnesota. WCAG 2.0 Guidelines are categorized into 3 levels of conformance: A (lowest), AA (mid range), and AAA (highest). By conforming to AA, Web content meets both the A and AA conformance levels. AA is the University of Minnesota Standard. If a Web site conforms to Level AA, it means that it will be accessible for most people, under most circumstances.
To comply with the University of Minnesota standard:
All prerecorded audio-video content must have captions. This is Success Criterion 1.2.2:
"Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media, except when the media is a media alternative for text and is clearly labeled as such. (Level A)"
All live audio-video content must have captions. This is Success Criterion is 1.2.4:
"Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media. (Level AA)"