Captions
Resource: Captions
Host: University of Washington
What it is: “Captions provide a text version of a video’s spoken audio, plus a description of important sounds, synchronized with the video. Typically users can toggle captions on or off using a CC button on their media player. Captions must be available in order to ensure audio content is accessible to people from the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community. They also help people for whom English is a second language, people who process information better if presented in multiple modes (sound and text), people who are unfamiliar with the vocabulary used in the video, people who have the sound turned off on their devices, and people in noisy environments who are unable to hear the sound from their devices. Also, in supporting media players, captions make it possible for users to search the video and can be repurposed as an interactive transcript so users can jump directly to particular points in the video from the transcript text.”
