Introduction to captions

What is captioning?  

Captioning is where a text-based version of the spoken part of media content is visible alongside the media. Sometimes captioning is also referred to as subtitling.   

Why do I need to add captions to my media?  

Captions benefit many people including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, viewers who have English as an additional language and those who are in noisy environments, enabling them to understand the media without relying on the audio.  Many colleagues have found that the process of adding captions takes time; and we hope these webpages will be helpful in helping you to manage your captioning more effectively.   

What is the difference between automated and human corrected captioning?  

Some systems provide automated captioning tools which can be used to convert spoken words into text.    This automated captioning can be done quickly and is available for free in most of our University media tools. Media Hopper Create, Media Hopper Replay, Teams and Zoom all include automated captions.  

Automated captioning is done by computer software and will always require editing to improve accuracy.   The software has been modelled and trained on a corpus of spoken word which is largely generic and not specific to academia. This means that many of the words, phrases, names (etc) you say may not be recognised. They also may not be recognised if your accent was not included in the training data.    You should spend some time thinking about how the software handles the speech you are converting and correcting.  Background noise, speaker volume and clarity, accents, subject-specific terminology and pace of speech all impact the quality of the audio and therefore impact the accuracy of the automated captions.   

• Tips for improving the accuracy of automated captions

Our systems also provide tools to allow you to edit the automated captions to improve their accuracy.  Becoming expert at correcting captions is helped by an understanding of how the  tools  work.  We have conducted testing in Information Services to compare various tools so that we can offer you the best support possible.  Some small changes to how you create your media may improve the accuracy of the automated captions and make them easier to correct.