UW leads with new captioning, transcription services for learners

UW–Madison has selected two firms to provide captioning and transcription services. Using these tools, faculty and staff can make their learning materialzs — such as Web pages, online presentations, videos and other media — accessible to students who are deaf or hard of hearing and to other learners. UW–Madison is one of only two institutions to endorse statewide adoption of captions and transcripts for Web content.

After several months of research and negotiation, a cross-campus team selected Automatic Sync Technologies (AST), whose product is Caption Sync, and 3Play Media to provide captioning and transcription services. UW faculty and staff can simply create an account and log in to use the service they select.

“The benefits of captioning are usually associated with people who are deaf or hard of hearing,” says Alice Anderson, the coordinator of the Technology Accessibility Program. “But research shows that captioning also benefits other learners by improving reading and listening comprehension, word recognition, decoding and other skills. In addition, captions can contribute to improved literacy for others, such as those who are learning English as a second language.”

Each vendor’s product has its unique strengths, and both are easy to use.

Caption Sync’s Web-based interface enables users to quickly and easily submit their media and obtain captions in a variety of file formats via e-mail. The service can create caption files from a transcript in a matter of minutes. If a transcript is not available, trained stenographers can create one in a few days; AST does not rely on automated speech recognition tools.

3Play Media includes an “Interactive Tools” feature that highlights individual words in the transcript as they are spoken on the video, enabling users to click on a word in the transcript to jump to that point in the video. With a video clipping/editing feature, an instructor can highlight text in the transcript to create a video clip of that portion of the presentation. The clip can then be embedded on any Web site.

View details on captioning at UW–Madison.