How do Captioning and Transcripts Work?

What is captioning and who uses transcripts? Learn here how some assistive technology solutions can assist Deaf, Hard of Hearing and people with a visual impairment.

Captioning

Captioning is a method that ensures that users who are hearing-impaired get similar experience of video and audio. Usually appearing below the video clip, it looks similar to subtitles on foreign language films. Captioning for video is the description of every thing that occurs during the footage, including the description of action, usually shown in square brackets: such as “[dog barks under the tree.]”

Captioning can also use the position of the text to indicate the person speaking, in the case of multiple characters.

Windows Media uses wmv-files extensions for movies; captions are called smi-files and linking is done in asx-files. For QuickTime movies the file is mov, caption are stored in txt-files and linking is done in the smil-file.

Depending on the format your video or audio is, there needs to be a file to link the video to the captions. In Windows, an .asx file opens the Windows Media Player to reference the captions file. Similarly, a .smil file is needed in case of QuickTime; it sets a video region and references the correct video file and sets a text region for the captions. It is ideal to use a .gtl (QuickTime file) to guarantee that the QuickTime opens in the correct payer.

More about Cationing in the article “What is Closed Captioning?” 

Transcripts

Basically targeted at users who are visually impaired, the transcripts are full-length accounts of what was spoken or of what has occurred. Usually, they are read to the user through screen-reading software and can take the form of a Web page, a MS Word document, PDF file or a plain rich text file. The transcript contains a brief outline of the subject matter of the video/audio material. It also displays the members participating and indicates the duration of the material (5 minutes or full-length film).

Once these details are established, the transcript will have a clear and concise list of what every person has said and any actions or activities that have also occurred.