Increasing Accessibility with Transcripts and Captions
Alliance Labs recently explored the creation and use of transcripts and captions for online video. Here are some key points from the post:
- Transcripts and captions differ on purpose and context.
- A transcript is the text version of a multimedia file. You can read a transcript without playing the video file.
- Captions appear while the video is playing, to provide a synced text version of the audio.
- To be accessible to the maximum number of users, web multimedia should include both synchronized captions AND a descriptive transcript.
- YouTube has some built-in accessibility features, but there are many captioning and transcribing services.
- Although both caption and transcribing produce files consisting of written text, it may not be feasible to adapt one to create the other: you may need a separate service for each.
The Alliance Labs post, below, includes their findings about which services worked best for their purposes. You may need to do your own experiments; many companies will provide sample files that can help you choose which service will work best for you.
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