Discussed DRES video captioning services and Tech Services' new Kaltura offerings

• ​Drew MacGregor went over the variety of options available for captioning in Kaltura
• Mentioned that many (most?) professors upload to YouTube, use its automatic captioning to get a 70-80% accurate transcript, then edit to create a fully accurate caption set
• Mentioned that Kaltura will have a caption editing option available "soon" (no timetable available)
• Hadi had concerns about Kaltura's accessibility:
  • Input from Keith, Lori, Ann, et. al. suggests that Kaltura has good captioning support but lags in keyboard and screen reader accessibility
  • Keith, Lori, and Drew have separately been in communication with Kaltura about improvements; Keith wrote a script to fix front end issues and sent it to Kaltura
  • Kaltura has been silent on the issues for weeks/months
  • Drew is attempting to rally other universities that use the software to push for accessibility improvements​

Group discussed captioning best practices

• ​Best practice is white text on black background, at bottom of screen
  • Text can be moved when necessary to avoid blocking important visual elements
  • Some captioners use color to differentiate speakers; this is not good (color blindness, poor color contrast). Speaker identification tags should instead be used
• Discussion on transcribing words as spoken vs. words as intended
  • DRES attempts to transcribe as spoken, especially when important in context of talk e.g. dropping trailing 'g' when Southerner is talking about cultural heritage
  • DRES will transcribe as intended in cases where accent is not important in context of talk, but will often note the speaker's accent in aside (e.g. economist using "tomato" as an example in economic lecture)
  • Hasn't received complaints from ESL or other caption readers re. understandability, but recognizes that it could be an issue
• Visual description discussed
  • The Visual Made Verbal by Joel Snyder mentioned as excellent book on topic

Tools for editing captions/subtitles:

• ​Movie Captioner: good UI, only available on Mac and somewhat limited license (have to ask Drew to install)
• Subtitle Edit (free; mentioned as good tool for adjusting off-sync caption timestamps)
• YouTube's auto captions are hit-or-miss, especially with accents - need heavy editing but build-in caption editor is very usable