why we do captions course

Full Answer

What are captions and why do I need them?

Captions are an important tool in video production to make videos and even entire movies or TV shows accessible to a larger - possibly even international - audience. Deaf and hearing impaired people can easily follow and understand your videos through subtitles.

Why should you add captions to your eLearning videos?

When it comes to creating online courses, eLearning videos are a crucial component. Educational videos provide the window into the course content and allow students to review and self-study. Yet, having a video might not be enough to achieve the learning outcomes. One additional learning tool is adding captions and subtitles to your content.

Are captions and subtitles required for online courses?

Are captions and subtitles required for online courses? Accommodating people with disabilities is the foundation of the American Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990. By law, most higher education institutions — public and private — must offer closed captioning to support deaf or hard of hearing students to be ADA compliant.

Is there a course with captions in English and German?

[Remark: This course contains manually created/timed captions in English and German. Feel free to use this feature to follow along the course contents. Deaf and hearing impaired people as well as people whose second language is English (or German) can follow this course without any problems.]

What is the purpose and use of captions?

The primary purpose of captions is to provide deaf and hard of hearing audiences to obtain a clear understanding of not just the dialogue, but of the surrounding sounds, such as laughter, dog barking, music, etc. Subtitling and captioning go hand-in hand.

What are the benefits of captions?

More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing.

Do captions help learning?

For students who are learning English, captioned media can help improve vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and word recognition and decoding skills. Using captioned videos can help ensure that these students access important material.

How does captions help the reader?

Choosing to turn captions on is a very simple – yet effective – way to help your child learn. Students can increase vocabulary, comprehension, and reading skills by watching even entertainment programs with the captions turned on. Closed captions help children learn sight words and reinforce reading skills.

Accessibility

When you make your content accessible, you allow people who might be deaf or hard of hearing to have access to the videos you produce. More than 5% of the world's population has some form of hearing loss, by adding captions there is an opportunity to serve and reach this group.

Helping people with English as a Second Language (ESL)

If you want to reach a larger audience, you should add captions to a video to make it easier for non-native English speakers to understand.

Improve the average video watch time

Captions tend to grab and hold an audience’s attention, people are more likely to watch a video to its completion if they have the option to turn on captions.

Indexing for search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines can’t crawl video. However, they can crawl the text on websites. If it is important to rank your video higher on Google, then add captions and a transcript to your video.

User Experience

80% of people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing. Captions give an audience the ability to enjoy video content regardless of the environment they are in.

Why are captions important?

It is widely known that captioning a video not only promotes digital inclusion for those viewers with hearing impairments but that it also greatly improves the user-friendliness of your content. But why captions are important?

What can you do with captions and transcripts?

With captions and transcripts you can easily give your content a new purpose: You can for instance create a blogpost on your video content or write a summary, an article etc.. – everything is possible!

Why do subtitles help in videos?

Adding subtitles to your videos can help with that! Because they help to stay focused and to relax the brain even when it’s confronted with strong accents, complicated content, disturbing background noises or tiring lengths. The following link leads you to an interesting article on concentration fatigue in connection with deafness: https://hearmeoutcc.com/concentration-fatigue-affects-deaf-people/

Types of Captions

There are two common types of captions — open and closed. Open captions appear on the screen and cannot be turned off, while closed captions can be turned on or off as desired by the viewer (United States National Institutes for Health, 2017). However, the content of the captions can vary.

Use of Captions by Learners

A 2006 survey of television viewers in the United Kingdom found that nearly 7.5 million people were using captions, despite about 6 million — or 80% — of respondents not having a hearing impairment (United Kingdom Office of Communications, 2006).

Importance of Caption Accuracy

Broadcast television, which originated the use of captioning, serves as a guide for the level of accuracy needed when adding captions to a course’s multimedia and video content. While we should always strive for 100% accuracy, the broadcast standard for captions is 98% accuracy.

How to Improve Captions for all Learners

Regardless of whether the captions for multimedia and video content are created by you or a third-party, the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) recommends that captions are:

Why do you need closed captioning in a video?

Closed captioning adds value to your video by enhancing the learner’s experience while providing support for hard-of-hearing students. Even if you don’t work at a school or university, you may want to add closed captioning to a video on Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, or corporate training video.

What is closed caption?

Closed caption files entail the written words of what is said in the video. Within the data are also time codes for each line of text, and some include position and style information for deaf or hard of hearing viewers. Closed caption files come in different formats, but the most common is SubRip Subtitle files (SRT).

Why add subtitles to eLearning videos?

By now, you’ve realized the benefits of captions and subtitles. Adding script to your eLearning videos enhances the learning experience, supports deaf and hard of hearing students, and accounts for visual and auditory learners. It also allows students to read and analyze the transcript to increase understanding further.

Why are videos important in eLearning?

When it comes to creating online courses, eLearning videos are a crucial component. Educational videos provide the window into the course content and allow students to review and self-study. Yet, having a video might not be enough to achieve the learning outcomes. One additional learning tool is adding captions and subtitles to your content.

Do you need captions in eLearning?

Not only do captions and subtitles increase learning, but often are a legal requirement at schools and universities. We’ve created a guide for how to add captions and subtitles to your eLearning videos in online courses regardless of the chosen learning platform.

Can you add subtitles to your online classes?

Another option is to add subtitles in multiple languages, besides English. Your online lessons become more accessible and reach a larger audience when subtitles are available in your student’s native language. If you’re selling your courses online, this could result in higher sales from a broad er audience.

Does Rev have captions?

Rather have the captions added straight to your videos? Rev now offers burned-in captions (open captions). Just check the “burned-in captions” box at checkout and you’ll receive a video with permanent, hard-coded captions added straight to your videos. Also available for foreign language subtitles!

Why are closed captions important?

Captions are an important tool in video production to make videos and even entire movies or TV shows accessible to a larger - possibly even international - audience. Deaf and hearing impaired people can easily follow and understand your videos through subtitles. You help foreign language learners to learn a new language. Maybe you have even used subtitles in your favorite TV show yourself to improve your foreign language skills - especially if English is not your first language.

Can deaf people understand subtitles?

Deaf and hearing impaired people can easily follow and understand your videos through subtitles. You help foreign language learners to learn a new language. Maybe you have even used subtitles in your favorite TV show yourself to improve your foreign language skills - especially if English is not your first language.

Do captions distract from video?

However, a lot of them fail to explain how to design great captions that are easy to follow and that do not distract from the video content. Captions should support the viewer in his understanding of your video contents. While well designed captions add value to a video, bad captions may even disturb the viewer.

Complying with the Equality Act

Passed in 2010, The Equality Act encapsulated all nine previous anti-discrimination laws and rendered discrimination illegal in the workplace.

Improve comprehension and test results

Providing captioning for education has been proven to help boost student comprehension and participation, and not just disabled students.

Post Covid-19 world

We are still bang in the middle of a pandemic, one which seems to be going no-where fast.

Accessibility

Helping People with English as A Second Language

Improve The Average Video Watch Time

Indexing For Search Engine Optimization

User Experience

• 80% of people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing. Captions give an audience the ability to enjoy video content regardless of the environment they are in. This is useful when an individual is in a noisy area or when it's important that there is a need to focus on the speech in the video and especially when the speech is difficult to un...

See more on ucl.ac.uk

Types of Captions

Use of Captions by Learners

Importance of Caption Accuracy

• Broadcast television, which originated the use of captioning, serves as a guide for the level of accuracy needed when adding captions to a course’s multimedia and video content. While we should always strive for 100% accuracy, the broadcast standard for captions is 98% accuracy. During the broadcast of the 2020 Super Bowl, captions were provided in...

See more on qualitymatters.org

How to Improve Captions For All Learners