How to Write Captions
Best practice guidelines for writing comprehensive and effective captions to make videos accessible.
Best Practices for Writing CaptionsWhy Make Multimedia Accessible?
Videos are increasingly utilized in the classroom. By making videos accessible to a greater audience, we ensure that all participants can access the content being shared. Accessible videos include captions, a transcript, an audio description, and employ an accessible media player.
Provided on this page are several resources on how to make Multimedia accessible. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you have a recommendation or guide request, please reach out to us.
For opportunities to learn more about creating accessible content, check out the IAG Trainings and Services for live trainings and accessibility check opportunities.
What Doesn't Work: Common issues and solutions
The following list consists of the most common issues that make multimedia content inaccessible and quick steps for how to avoid them:
Instead: provide accurate closed captions to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the video
Instead: edit captions and transcripts before distributing your content
Instead: provide captions with timestamps at 15 second intervals for shorter videos. For longer videos, timestamps are required at least at the following events:
- Significant change in speaker
- Topic change
- Slide change
Instead: explain visuals during recording or retroactively add audio description.
Guides for Creating Accessible Multimedia
Create and Edit Captions in Yuja
Yuja is a leader in enterprise video solutions and the MSU Denver video library partner.
Yuja: Create and Edit Captions
Create and Edit Captions on YouTube
YouTube is an online video sharing platform and provides auto-generated captions. These captions can often be inaccurate, but can be edited with this guide.
YouTube: Create and Edit Captions
Manage Captions and Transcripts in Microsoft Stream
This guide is dedicated to explaining how you can generate automatic captions in Microsoft Stream.
Microsoft Stream: Manage Captions and Transcripts
Create Transcripts using Otter.ai
Otter Voice Meetings Notes is an application that will record and automatically transcribe oral content with a 90% accuracy.
Otter.ai: How to Create Transcripts
Create Captions Using Amara
Amara is a web-based non-profit project created you to host and create user-subtitle videos.
Amara: How to Create Captions
Use Microsoft Word to create Transcripts from Audio
Word can be used with both pre-recorded audio and live dictation to create and edit transcripts.
Use Microsoft Word to create transcripts from AudioDig Deeper with these Additional Resources (external links)
- Visit the Web Accessibility in Mind, Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Description page for more information on supporting multimedia.
- The Described and Captioned Media Program Captioning Key (dcmp.org) website has great guidelines on captioning.
- Visit the General Services Administration’s page on creating 508 Accessible Videos to learn more about creating videos in compliance with Section 508.
- Visit the Web Accessibility Initiative’s page for more resources on Making Audio and Video Media Accessible