Best practice guidance: library skills videos

Captions, or subtitles are an important aspect of accessibility. Like many accessibility best practices, they are also useful for everybody as they add clarity to videos and enable viewing without audio.

Strictly speaking, subtitles and captions are slightly different. Wikipedia tells us:

"Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they transcribe only dialogue and some on-screen text. Captions aim to describe... all significant audio content — spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speaking — along with any significant music or sound effects using words or symbols"

Closed captions are captions which can be truned on or off by the viewer, and are indicated by a CC symbol.

Open captions, or burned in captions, are a fixed part of the video file and cannot be turned off.

Captions can be added and edited in the following applications:

• Camtasia (license required).
• Microsoft Stream (available as part of Office 365) and therefore available to any member of UCL staff.

This is lifted directly from the PDF guide created by the Ear Institute.

• Avoid 3 lines or more text at a time. Maximum subtitle length of 2 lines is recommended.
• -(dash) Denotes new speaker
• Place names of people in brackets. Use [Presenter] or [Narrator] if not naming directly.
• ♭ Denotes music playing
• Must be on screen long enough to read.
• Separate subtitle for each new sentence of dialogue.
• Capitalise new sentences
• As much as possible, don’t include caption if there’s no talking.

Other good sources of best practice advice are included in the Further resources for captions box on this libguide.

The following links provide advice on captioning.