For video content, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning strongly recommends adding captions to your videos or making a transcript available. Doing so will make your content more assessible to your students.
What Are Captions?
Captions (also know as Closed Captions or Subtitles) are text that appears on the screen that allow the viewer to read what is audibly being spoken about in your video recording.
What are Transcripts?
A transcript is a text document that contains the written dialogue of everything that was audibly spoken or heard in a video recording.
Why Should I Create Captions?
Not only will providing captions on your video recordings makes your content more assessible to students who have hearing impairments and to English as a Second Language students, there is growing evidence suggesting that providing captions on your videos benefits all learners.
Here are some common reasons given by students as to why they find captions on video recordings useful:
- Helps them focus
- Helps them retain information
- Helps them overcome poor audio quality
- Allows viewing of content in sensitive environments (viewing videos in public places where sound cannot be used)
How Can I Create Captions?
Employees can create captions for their VIUTube videos by using Camtasia’s Speech to Text feature.
Camtasia is a video creation and editing sofrware avaliable to all VIU employees. Using Camtasia’s Speech to Text feature, you can automatically generate captions for your videos based on the audio that is currently inserted into the timeline.
To request a license to Camtasia, please Contact the IT Department for further assistance.
This video here will demonstrate how to create captions for a video using Camtasia. For further assistance with Camtasia, please check out Techsmith’s Support Resources.
How Do I Add Captions to a VIUTube Video?
In order to add captions to your VIUTube videos, you will need to create a properly formatted caption file. VIUTube accepts the following caption file formats:
- SRT
- DXFP
- VTT
Once you have created your caption file, you add captions to your VIUTube video by following the instructions on the Add Captions page on our website.
Alternatively, please view the following video for steps on how you can upload a caption file to your VIUTube video:
How Do I Create a Transcript File?
If you are recording lectures or videos using Zoom and have enabled the Auto Transcription feature in your Zoom meeting, you can download a transcript file containing text of everything that was spoken about in that meeting room.
You can find more information about enabling Live Transcription and managing the Live Transcription feature on Zoom’s website.
Please Note: It is not currently possible to download a caption file of everything that was spoken about in your Zoom meeting. If you would like to add captions to a Zoom video recording, please use Camtasia and the transcript file to assist you in making captions for your video recording.
Please view the following video for more information and steps on how you can create a transcript file in Zoom:
Further Questions?
If you have further questions about Zoom or VIUTube, please contact the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning. You can reach us by email (learnsupport@viu.ca) or phone (250-740-6179)