Captioning Guidelines

All videos with audio content must have captions.

Captioning is the process of converting the audio content of a video to displaying the text on a screen or monitor. They make it easier for people who need to access information in audio media but can't hear the content because:

• they have a disability (deaf and hard of hearing)
• they don't have equipment such as speakers or headphone.

Captions not only include dialogue but identify who is speaking and include non-speech information conveyed through sound, including meaningful and important sound effects.

It is important that the captions are:

• synchronized and appear at approximately the same time as the audio is delivered
• equivalent and equal in content to that of the audio, including speaker identification and sound effects
• accessible and readily available to those who need or want them.

Captioning Key: Guidelines and Preferred Techniques

Best Practices in Online Captioning

Captions/Subtitles | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C

Caption vs Subtitle

Captioning and subtitling are different media with deceptively similar appearance.

1. Captions are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. The assumed audience for subtitling is hearing people who do not understand the language of dialogue.
2. Captions move to denote who is speaking; subtitles are almost always set at bottom centre.
3. Captions can explicitly state the speaker’s name:
   1. Cigarette Smoking Man:
   2. [Martin]
   3. Announcer:
4. Captions notate sound effects and other dramatically significant audio. Subtitles assume you can hear the phone ringing, the footsteps outside the door, or a thunderclap.
5. Subtitles are Captions are usually closed, but can be opened by users.
6. Captions are usually in the same language as the audio. Subtitles are usually a translation.
7. Subtitles also translate onscreen type in another language, e.g., a sign tacked to a door, a computer monitor display, a newspaper headline, or opening credits.
8. Subtitles never mention the source language. A film with dialogue in multiple languages will feature continuous subtitles that never indicate that the source language has changed. (Or only dialogue in one language will be subtitled – for example, Life Is Beautiful, where only the Italian is subtitled, not the German.)
9. Captions tend to render the language of dialogue, transliterate the dialogue, or state the language:
   1. Je vous en prie, monsieur.
   2. Ogenki desu ka?
   3. [Speaking Russian]
10. Captions ideally render all utterances. Subtitles do not bother to duplicate some verbal forms, e.g., proper names uttered in isolation (“Jacques!”), words repeated (“Help! Help! Help!”), song lyrics, phrases or utterances in the target language, or phrases the worldly hearing audience is expected to know (“Danke schön”).
11. Captions render tone and manner of voice where necessary:
    1. [whispering]
    2. [British accent]
    3. [Vincent, narrating]
12. Subtitles can be captioned (subtitles first, captions later) but not the other way around.

Captioning Checklist

Do the captions include:

• Speaker identification for multiple speakers?
• Dialogue and narration?
• Tone and manner of voice, as needed (whispering).
• Important sounds, such as an explosion and a fire alarm.

Are the captions:

• Accurate?
  • Free from grammatical errors?
  • Free from punctuation errors?
• Consistent (uniformity in style and presentation)?
• Clear (A complete textual representation of the audio)?
• Readable:
  • displayed with enough time to be read completely?
  • synchronized and appear at approximately the same time as the audio is delivered?
  • not obscured by, nor do they obscure the visual content?
  • Have enough colour contrast (4.5 to 1 for small-scale text, 3:1 for large-scale text) between the video and the captions?
• Equal:
  • the meaning and intention of the material is completely preserved?