Accessibility | Feature
Closed Captioning: Getting Your Lines Right
As lecture capture and distance learning take hold in higher ed, colleges pursue different approaches to the issue of closed captioning and transcription.
- By Bridget McCrea
- 08/01/11
The rapid growth of lecture capture and distance education in higher education is raising fresh concerns about accessibility, since it's difficult--if not impossible--for hearing-impaired students to use these tools effectively. As a result, many colleges and universities are renewing their focus on closed captioning as a viable solution.
While the impetus for closed captioning stems from a desire to accommodate students with hearing issues, schools are also discovering that closed captioning has broader appeal, particularly among students for whom English is a second language. And for the rest of the students on campus, there's one other big benefit: It allows them to search captured content quickly, by enabling keyword searches.
Closing in on Automation
George Mason University (VA) believes the answer is yes. The school, whose population comprises an increasing number of students with disabilities--including veterans who are deaf or hard of hearing--already uses remote Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services in the classroom. This technology allows a deaf or hearing-impaired person to use a password and username to log onto the web and view a real-time text translation of what's being said in class. (The system requires a trained operator at a remote location to provide manual transcription.)
Now, the university is looking to replace that system with a more automated solution. It recently approved a "caption proposal" that will allow faculty to upload their files and have them captioned quickly.
"We’re going to be a multimedia capturing service right here in our office," says Kara Zirkle, IT accessibility coordinator and head of the school's Assistive Technology Initiative. Her team will use the Docsoft:AV audio/video search and closed captioning system. In use at the school for a few years, the server-based technology includes an integrated voice-recognition system.
Although George Mason's closed-captioning procedures are still under development, Zirkle envisions a time when faculty members will upload their captured lectures to a server. Then, using voice-recognition capabilities, the software will create a time-stamped transcription. "For a one-hour video, the system can produce a transcript within 45 minutes," asserts Zirkle.
Just how accurate the closed captioning will be remains to be seen. "It will really depend on the audio quality, the speaker’s accent, and other variables," says Zirkle. As a result, George Mason isn't quite ready to trust the entire captioning process to automation. Once transcribed, the file will be opened in Docsoft Transcript Editor, where student workers will edit the transcript and clean up the text to match the video. "This allows us to have a clean, time-stamped transcript that can be played in Windows Media Player or other preferred players," explains Zirkle.
In the long run, Zirkle believes her school's IT-centric approach will prove more affordable than using an outside service or graduate students to handle the bulk of the work. "The one-time purchase fee for Docsoft is much more economical than spending the minimum $150 for a single instance of CART services in the classroom," she says.