Captioning Videos and Presentations

Thinking ahead and planning to make your resources accessible to persons with disabilities shows a commitment to widely serving your users. When websites and web tools are properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them; however, many sites and tools are currently developed with accessibility barriers that make them difficult or impossible for some people to use.

Making the web accessible benefits individuals, businesses, and society. International web standards define what is needed for accessibility. ( https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/)

Captioning videos is one component of accessibility that may be mandated on your campus or encouraged to provide support services to students and alumni. As you will be creating and repurposing video content for your Wisr site, there are two options to support captioning.

For new content or streaming video, PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 can transcribe your words as you present and display them on-screen as captions in the same language you are speaking, or as subtitles translated to another language. This can help accommodate individuals in the audience who may be deaf or hard of hearing, or more familiar with another language, respectively.

To turn on subtitles, you will need to start your presentation and click the subtitles icon.

For best results, we highly recommend using a headset microphone connected to the device running PowerPoint. Also, the feature requires a reliable internet connection throughout your presentation.

There are also position, size, color, and other appearance options for the captions and subtitles to accommodate different environments and audience needs.

If you have existing video that needs captioning, Wisr customers can utilize our Wistia license for closed captioning services. If you are not familiar with Wistia, we suggest you start by reading the Managing your Videos in Wistia article. A competitively affordable option, Wistia offers professional captions at $2.50/minute and automated captions for $0.25/minute. Either option will provide you with a Word document you can edit to your liking, You can read about the differences between these two services on Wistia’s site: https://wistia.com/support/customizing/captions. If you plan to use this option, please alert your customer success associate. Arrangements must be made in advance to prepare for pass-through billing.