Recently I assisted a public sector client in the creation of a series of training videos (I was involved given the legal nature of the topic). Given that they were to be embedded within a government website, it became important to ensure that closed captioning and text transcripts would accompany the videos. This is something the Department of Internal Affairs highlighted for us.
Having worked for SSC and DIA for a number of years, I was familiar with the New Zealand Government Web Standards, later to become the Web Accessibility Standard and Web Usability Standard, and the fact that Cabinet has mandated departmental compliance with them. But I’d never had hands on experience with closed captioning and transcripts for videos. I’d mentioned to clients in the past that they are required in certain circumstances but, as I say, no hands on experience.
To be perfectly honest, despite their importance, I feared that the provision of closed captioning and transcripts would significantly delay release of the training videos and that it’d be an arduous process to get them in place. Thanks to a helpful colleague at DIA, I soon discovered that it was far easier than I’d imagined, so much so that I want to explain how it worked.
These were the steps in this particular case:
- Create videos
- Upload them to a private YouTube page
- Retain a video captioning and transcription service
- Request the service to provide captions for the videos
- Once the captions had been created, review and where necessary amend the captions (by the time you get to see them, they have already been uploaded to and synced with the videos)
- Upload the amended caption files to YouTube, one file per video (in this case, DIA did this for us)
- Produce full text transcripts from the caption files (in this case the transcripts were a proper reflection of the video slides so no additional inserts were required)
- Release videos on government website together with captions and transcripts.
In this instance, we used 3PlayMedia to produce the captions. They were fast and cost-effective (the cost was very reasonable). They produced the captions swiftly and, whilst I needed to correct a few things, I estimate that they were about 95% accurate. To put it mildly, I was super impressed.
Now, I’m not giving a government endorsement of a particular service provider. It’s not my place and I’ve no authority to do so. I’m just commenting on the service from the perspective of an external service provider that used the service. As I say, I was super impressed.
I now know that the provision of captioning and full text transcripts can be a straight-forward and interesting process (I didn’t mention it above but the 3PlayMedia web interface was easy and interesting to use). In my own mind, at least, there is now harmony between the need for captions and transcripts (for videos on departmental websites) and the ease with which they can be put in place. It feels as if the stars have aligned.