Finding Captioned Media
The following video sources may have media that is adequately captioned:
- Broadcast news sites are required by law to offer captioned videos clips taken from their broadcast feed. Here is a survey of news services indicating which consistently provide closed captions: Survey of News Sources for Captioning (click on the "News Source Survey" tab)
- YouTube has a filter to sort for search results with captions.
- On YouTube's search results page, click the "Filters" button at the top of the results list.
- Under the "Features" column, choose "Subtitles/CC". Now your search results should have captions.
- Please note: YouTube’s “English (auto-generated)” captions are not sufficient for providing equal access. Look instead for “English” in the list of languages. These are captions uploaded by the user instead of generated by voice recognition software.
- TED Talks offer a wide variety of subtitles tracks on their site. The TED Talks YouTube channel may not always have captions, so go to the TED site to find the captioned version.
- TEDx Talks often do not have captions.
- Kanopy, LinkedIn Learning, and AlexanderStreet ( available through JMU Libraries) are sites streaming full length educational and documentary programs that are captioned.
- If you pay for Hulu, Netflix, or other streaming services, full-length television episodes and films are captioned.
- PBS offers captioned clips of programs for any user. Captioned full-length programming can be accessed if you are a member.
- Amara.org is a crowd source captioning site for online videos from YouTube and Vimeo. You can browse for already captioned videos.
This list is modified from the University of Georgia Disability Resources Center .
Checking Captions for Accuracy
To ensure captions are accurate, it is ideal to watch the entire video with captions on. You can also turn off the sound and watch the video to see if the captions convey the necessary information. At the very least, watch 15-30 seconds of the video with captions. For longer videos, check several sections to ensure consistency.
When checking captions, look for:
- Correct capitalization and punctuation.
- Accurate spelling of specific and specialized words.
- Representation of important sounds and music.
- Accurate synchronization with the audio.
- Appropriate caption length (no more than 3 lines of text, each line around 40 characters or 7-10 words).
Some minor errors, like one misspelled word or slight timing misalignment, may be acceptable.
Checking Captions on YouTube
On YouTube, you can easily spot auto-generated captions by following these steps.
You can use this method to check for human-generated captions, but you should still verify their accuracy. Some creators misuse captions for extra information, such as instructions or citations, which does not make the video accessible.
- Click the gear icon at the bottom right of the video player.
- Select "Subtitles/CC" to view available caption tracks. If this option is grayed out, there are no captions.
- Avoid tracks labeled "auto-generated." Human-generated captions and corrected automatic captions will be labeled as "English," "English (United States)," or similar.
