This week, we’re excited to launch our new campaign, which reminds learning and teaching staff to turn on captions for online classes and video content. Including a short video featuring UTS students alongside their blog posts, plus the LX.lab’s own David Yeats, we’re spreading the message that captions are vital for making your content accessible for everyone.
Unpacking captions
You might have heard of captions by some other names, including but not limited to: subtitles, transcripts, live transcription, closed captions, CC, open captions, burnt-in captions, automatic captions, live captions, professional captions, human-based captions, stenography, text alternative, machine-based captions, AI captioning, translation, captions for pre-recorded material, video captions, interactive transcript.
Yes, it can seem overwhelming. But we’re here to simplify it for you.
What are captions?
Captions are words that appear on a screen that communicate what is being said or heard (they are a text alternative). Their purpose is to convey audio content as text for people who experience hearing loss, and they are played in time with multimedia content. They are critical for people with hearing loss but there are more surprising ways that captioning improves learning for all your students.
Subtitles look very similar to captions, but their purpose is different. They are for people who can hear the content but do not understand the language, so they are a translation. For example, think about watching a film in a different language from the one you speak natively. While subtitles are still useful for someone with hearing loss, they don’t convey all the essential audio including music or sounds.
Transcripts are a complete written copy of spoken words. They are usually in the one document.
You can find out more about captions in our Using captions resource collection.
Why is it important to know about captions?
Captions are only useful if your students can see them. Sometimes captions are available to students by default, but not always – and this is why we’re asking all learning and teaching staff at UTS to turn on your captions for students. It’s helpful for everyone, but for some students it’s critical.
In the video above, UTS students Angelique Milojevic and Roudy Gerges show just two examples of the many different reasons that students may need captions. And there are so many ways that captions are helpful for students, whether because of hearing loss, to assist with a language barrier, to help with cognition or concentration, if they’re watching your content in a noisy place, to counteract unclear audio, or to keep up with the content. There are even more reasons why a student might benefit from captions, but the main takeaway is that making sure students can access captions means they are more likely to be able to understand what you are trying to teach them.
Get support for accessibility
If you want to make your content more accessible but you’re not sure where to start, the LX.lab can help. You can book in for a consultation with our staff, or start with one of our accessibility resource collections.
- Using captions
- Inclusive and accessible practices
- Reasonable adjustments and alternative assessments
- Recent updates for using Zoom captions