Whether it’s to accommodate a student or employee who requests them or to comply with FCC broadcasting rules, captions are needed for videos to be accessible.
You can hire a professional closed captioning company or make captions in-house. Ultimately, you need to make sure that the captions you end up with are good enough.
In the webinar, Understanding Closed Captioning Standards and Guidelines, closed captioning experts, Jason Stark and Cindy Camp, review the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) captioning guidelines. They provide insight that will help you produce captions that are accurate, consistent, clear, and reliable.
Below is a portion of the Q&A from the webinar:
Caption Formatting
What if the speaker makes a grammatical error? Should we caption based on the speaker or based on incorrect grammar?
What font and size are best for closed captions?
YouTube doesn’t allow you to add line breaks without copying them from somewhere else. They do this so that word wrapping for larger caption text does not increase the number of lines being used. How should we handle that when considering the 32-character-per-line limit?
Is there a format for closed captioning that supports caption placement?
Is there a minimum time that a caption frame should remain on screen?
Captioning Sound Effects
Should you caption sound effects that are not integral to the plot?
Captioning music lyrics may present a copyright problem. How do we manage that?
When music is used to set a mood, would we want to describe the music as ominous or happy to show how the music and visuals relate, or would that be considered subjective?
How to Select the Right Closed Captioning VendorForeign Languages, Accents, and Dialects
How should you handle foreign languages being spoken in a mostly English video?
How do you handle a person who speaks with an accent or dialect?
How should you include captions if there are foreign-language subtitles burned into the video?
Other Things to Consider
What does it really mean to create an “equal” viewing experience with captioning?
How do you handle profanity or inflammatory language?
How do you handle speakers talking over each other?
Watch the full webinar below:
This blog was originally published in October 2015 by Emily Griffith but has since been updated for clarity and freshness.
