Do the videos that you post on the OCPS Internet (district or school) include closed captioning?
The purpose of closed captioning is to assist people who are deaf or hard of hearing to understand the audio portions of your video. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as high as 5% of the world’s population has significant hearing loss that would require closed captioning in your videos to make the content meaningful. Closed Captioning should provide an accurate portrayal of any narration or dialog as well as any musical cues and relevant background sounds and noises. (Subtitles on the other hand are primarily mean as a translation aid from one language to another.)
Least you think that including closed captioning is optional, over 700 US lawsuits have been filed in the last three years against companies providing content without including closed captioning, more half of those were in the last year alone. But it also goes beyond the needs of the hearing disabled. In many environments, having the sound turned up on your computer when playing a video can be annoying and even disallowed as it is a distraction to others who may be in the immediate area (such as in an office environment). In these cases, being able to read the closed captioning while keeping the volume turned down or even off allows viewers to get all the content from your video. However, the value of closed captioning also applies to noisy environments such as on that bus or train ride home where you want to catch up on some of your content.
In some cases, closed captioning is provided automatically such as when you publish your videos to Youtube or Microsoft Stream. However, these automatically generated closed captioning systems may not always work as well as you would like especially depending on the speaker’s voice patterns, accents, volume, etc. Therefore, you may have to edit the resulting closed captioning text.
If you are using a system that does not automatically generate a closed captioning file, you can create your own by listening to the video and writing down the spoken content and then adding it to the video manually if your video editing software allows for a caption track such as that provided by Camtasia or iMovie. This is known as transcribing your video. This generally requires starting and stopping the video as you write out or type the dialog. Perhaps a better choice if possible is to start with a written script and record the video to that script. The disadvantage of this second method is that it often comes across as unnatural unless the person has had a lot of practice working with scripts.