Creating Accessible Videos: Captions and Transcripts

The rapid shift to online teaching due to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) exponentially increased the extent to which faculty use videoconferencing/virtual classroom tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. It also exposed the challenge of ensuring that all students could access all video content. Faculty may need to implement captions or transcripts in videos to not only address certain student accommodations but also fulfill an institution’s legal responsibilities, under accessibility laws, to conform to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Faculty can create captions and transcripts manually, use a third-party service to create them, or generate them with some recording tools. As faculty have quickly needed to adapt course materials from in-person to online instruction, they need to learn best practices for technology use in order to help all students succeed. In this paper, I share some personal experiences and lessons I have learned about creating and using accessible video content for online courses