Closed Captioning

All public facing videos must be closed captioned. Closed captioning allows individuals with a hearing disability to access the content of your videos.  Additionally, closed captioning is beneficial to a wide variety of students, including those for whom English is not their primary language, those who learn best by reading, and those who have trouble focusing.

ADA Guidelines for Captioning

  • Captions should be 99% accurate (correct spelling, grammar, punctuation etc. )
  • Add sound descriptions inside square brackets (i.e. [music] or [laughter])
  • Speakers should be identified when more than one person is onscreen or when the speaker is not visible.

    *Auto-generated captions are not ADA Compliant

For more detailed information please view the following:

Closed Captioning Tools

If streaming a video on a different platform than the one used to create captions, the caption file (.SRT or .VTT) will be need to upload to the streaming service.

  • ie. Services like Rev and 3Play will provide a caption file that will need to be uploaded along with the video to streaming services like Youtube and Brightcove.

For more information, watch this Closed Captioning Process Overview Video

There are many tools available online to close caption your videos, both paid and free (requires manual entry or editing). Below are some recommendations for captioning a pre-existing recorded video:

Zoom

YouTube

Amara

  • Amara provides the ability to manually caption/translate pre-recorded videos

Rev (Paid)

  • Rev provides paid closed captioning services. Users can upload their videos and Rev returns the captions within 24 hours.

3PlayMedia (Paid)

  • 3PlayMedia provides paid closed captioning services. Users can upload their videos and choose from different turn-around time options.

Streaming Closed Caption Videos on Cascade and WordPress Websites

Wesleyan Video Uploader (Brightcove)

  • To add videos to Cascade and Wordpress Websites you will need to upload the video and the caption file.
  • Use the Wesleyan Video Uploader Form (found in your Wesportal)