Which videos must be captioned?
To comply with the UW-Green Bay IT Accessibility Policy and federal regulations, all video and audio content in a course must be captioned, regardless of whether you have a student who has a documented disability.
All video content hosted in Kaltura (My Media) can be captioned either by ordering free machine-generated captions within Kaltura or by ordering professional captions by a formal request through Student Accessibility Services. If content is hosted elsewhere and uncaptioned, the instructor of the course may need to acquire or produce a new copy of the media so that it can be uploaded and captioned or ask the media owner to provide captions. Media which poses a copyright concern will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
What if I link to videos? Do they have to be captioned?
Yes. All content which is a part of your course must be captioned. In most cases of external media without captions, it is recommended that instructors instead find a suitable alternative with captions or provide a text-based alternative (e.g. the actual scientific study a selected cable news story is about). In many cases, professionally-produced content on services like Kanopy and TED are already captioned. Most videos on YouTube will have machine-generated automatic captions.
Are machine-generated captions good enough?
Sometimes. Unedited machine-generated captions are suitable as long as they do not contain errors which would make it more difficult for people who are D/deaf, are hard of hearing, have hearing loss, or are neurodiverse to understand the information that your video conveys. However, unedited machine-generated captions contain inaccuracies and usually do not meet the standard for reasonable accommodation necessary for a student with a documented disability. If notified of a student accommodation request by Student Accessibility Services, instructors must either order accurate professional captions for course videos or edit machine-generated captions to improve their accuracy and meet the necessary standard.
Can I proactively caption the content in my course?
Yes! Machine-generated captions can be easily and freely ordered within the Kaltura My Media service. Since December 1, 2021, English machine-generated captions are automatically ordered for all videos newly uploaded to Kaltura. Machine-generated captions can be manually ordered for any video that was uploaded to Kaltura before December 1, 2021. Please see Kaltura (Captioning) - Captioning Kaltura Videos for more information.
Machine-generated captions are typically not accurate enough to satisfy a formal Student Accessibility Services accommodations request, but they can be edited to improve their accuracy to achieve compliance for a student who requires an accommodation.
Captions may already be available elsewhere for your media (e.g. the video exists in a library database, it's a TED talk, etc.). There is a cost associated with having videos accurately captioned by a professional human-sourced captioning service, so please contact Student Accessibility Services or the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning for more information.
Can I manually create subtitles or captions for my own videos?
An instructor or student can accurately caption any video they own in Kaltura by uploading an SRT file (a specially formatted text file which includes the subtitle text and timing information) or by requesting machine generated captions in Kaltura My Media and then editing them. You can also upload a SRT file to a video you added to a page with the "Upload/Record Media" tool in the Canvas rich content editor.
Generating a SRT file can be done using a service such as subtitle-horse.com or Amara. The easiest path to captioning your videos yourself may be to upload your videos to Kaltura My Media, wait for the automatically ordered machine-generated captions to appear, and then edit those captions for accuracy with the Kaltura captions editor. Machine-generated Kaltura video captions appear about 30 minutes after a newly uploaded video has finished processing (or about 30 minutes after manually ordering machine-generated captions for an already-uploaded video).
I show films in class and I'm moving my class online - can I caption these videos?
Cases which deal with copyright concerns are handled on a case-by-case basis. A good first step is to search for a digital copy of the film or a suitable alternative on the UWGB Libraries website. Most videos in the Library's digital collection are professionally captioned. Please contact your department's library liaison for more information.
I have ownership of a video and Student Accessibility Services tells me I need it captioned. Now what?
Upload your video content to Kaltura (if you have not already done so). Then submit a request for captioning by forwarding the notice for captioning accommodation from Student Accessibility Services to dle@uwgb.edu along with the shareable link of each video that requires professional captioning (please see: Kaltura - Getting a Shareable Link for a My Media Video). You may also submit links to public YouTube videos. Please submit your media captioning requests well in advance of when you need to use the media in class. You should expect a 1-2 week turnaround time for the return of ordered captions. Alternatively, you may wish to caption the videos yourself using the methods described above or seek out a third-party captioning service.