Working with Video : Captioning Best Practices

All video (including Youtube) must be transcribed and/or captioned to meet ADA standards. Youtube has captioning available, but you will likely need to review it and clean it up, especially for acronyms, poor sounds quality, or speakers with accents.

Enclosed below are best practices guidelines for video production.

Captioning Best Practices

Transcribing Speech

• Do transcribe all speech and match what the speakers say exactly.
• However, stylistically, you may want to make a determination if you are going to code pause markers like "um" and "ah" or if you want to write informal speech like "gonna" as "going to" or keep it as "gonna," etc.
  • In captioning entertainment focused media, for example, such stylistic markers may be more important than in captioning academic content.
• Do record laughter or other expressed emotions (crying, etc.)

Transcribing Sound and/or Music

• If there are sounds that are important to the narrative (e.g., applause, sound effects, etc.) record those in brackets [applause]; [audience cheering]; [lightening off stage]. Don't forget to record expressed human emotion [crying], etc.
• When there is music and no words:
  • [ Music playing – no lyrics ] or [ Quiet music playing in background ]
  • If you know what kind of music is playing such as piano, pop, etc: [ Pop music playing ].
  • If there is music with no lyrics playing for a long time, you can input ♪ and leave it on the screen after saying there is music playing with no lyrics.
  • If there are lyrics to music, input and sync the lyrics with a music note before and at the end of each line.

Captions

• Captions should not stay on screen during long periods of silence. They should match the timing of the speaking unless the speaking is clipped making reading difficult.
• No more than 2 lines of text per caption.
• Limit yourself to 32 characters per line or approximately 4-8 words.
• Left justified and in the middle of the screen if at all possible.
  • However, captions should not be in a location that interferes with viewing important on screen information such as; overlapping the speaker's name, notes, scores, etc...
• Punctuation should be used to make meanings clear.
• Spell check, spell check, spell check! Nothing looks less professional than misspellings in captions.

Lyrical Example

One line:

♪ Raise her banner high! ♪

Two lines:

♪ I’m gonna wait ‘til

the midnight hour ♪

· If there is a long period of silence in between clips, it may be helpful to input [Silence].

· Input any nonverbal sounds such as [Gasps!] or [Wind blowing]

· When speech is absolutely inaudible and/or too quiet to hear, input [ Inaudible speech ]

Captioning Dos and Don'ts

Do not break a prepositional phrase between 2 lines

Do not separate proper names between 2 lines

Start sentence fragments on a new line

Split long phrases into shorter 4-8 length pieces (approximately 32 characters)