Closed Captions are for Everyone

Closed Captions (CC) are a synchronized transcription of what people say and the important sounds or music heard when viewing a video.

Without closed captions, people who are Deaf or hard of hearing are unable to participate or view a video. It is essentially silent. They need closed captions.

While they need the closed captions, everyone benefits from closed captions.

What can you do?

If you have videos on your website, social media, classrooms, or auditoriums, they should be closed captioned. Here are the steps:

Is anyone speaking? Having a conversation? Are they singing or acting? Reciting or lecturing? Telling a story through sound effects? If there is audio*, the video should be closed captioned.

* There are other captioning services for videos without audio. Contact your EIR Accessibility Coordinator or review the captioning services for more information.

Videos that are five (5) minutes or less are really easy to closed caption using the editing tools of video hosting solutions, like YouTube.

You can start yourself off with the auto-generated captions from YouTube, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams (recordings saved to Microsoft Stream). But do not stop there! Edit the auto-generated captions to fix phone numbers, email, web addresses, names, and other words.

Request closed captions from a professional captionist if the video is too long for you to do on your own.

When you submit your request, make sure you gave them everything they need to quickly write up the closed captions for your video. Faculty should also review instructional video guidelines at the Academic Digital Resource Center (A-DRC), including FERPA and copyright laws.

When the professional captionist sends the captioning files back to you, add or modify them using the closed captioning instructions for your video hosting solution.

Closed Captions are for Everyone

What can you do?

Step 1: Check if the video has audio.

Step 2: See if the video is short enough to quickly caption.

Step 3: Request professional closed captioning.

Step 4: Post your video for everyone.

EIR Accessibility Coordinator

Karole Schroeder