Captioning and Transcribing Audio/Video

This chapter will contain a video tutorial on captioning a video that you’ve uploaded to Youtube.com.  If a video doesn’t belong to you, there is a way to caption someone else’s Youtube video in Amara.org. These are both free methods and you may be able to take advantage of Youtube’s auto generated captioning to give you a head start.  You can also look at a Youtube video that talks about Best Free Way to Automatically Transcribe Video (Audio to Text).

The Value of Captioning and Transcribing

A recent survey based study by the Oregon State University Ecampus across 15 institutions, and 2,124 students found that captions and transcripts benefited not only students who were deaf or hard of hearing, but other subgroups of students as well. The study is called, “Student Uses and Perceptions of Closed Captions & Transcripts.”  A summary of findings are listed below:

1. 98.6% of students find captions helpful
2. 71% of students without hearing difficulties use captions at least some of the time
3. 66% of ESL students find captions “very” or “extremely” helpful
4. 52% of students use captions as a learning aid to improve comprehension
5. 15% of students didn’t know how to tell if a video had captions
6. The most common reason students use captions is to help them focus
7. The most common reason students use transcripts is as study guides