Captions and foreign language support
Captions and/or a transcript of all pre-recorded teaching must now be made available to students. The Student Services Digital Accessibility Guide explains this in detail.
Studies show captions have many benefits. They improve concentration, boost retention and are a helpful aid to international students engaging with online lectures where their native tongue is not being spoken. This is noted in Mike Lei’s (School of Computer Science) user story. Captions can also increase comprehension when learning a second language, which is why it is so positive to see our vendors adding support for non-English language captions to their products.
This means if you deliver a session in a foreign language and it is recorded, captions that match the language of delivery can now most likely be generated.
- Microsoft continues to support 7 foreign languages for autogenerated captions.
- Caption.Ed now supports Spanish, Italian and Simplified Chinese, plus more. (**Update September 2023 – the University no longer provides the Caption.Ed service as Panopto recordings are now automatically captioned).
- Panopto now supports captioning for 20 different foreign languages via a beta.
The Multiple Language ASR Captioning (beta) has been enabled on Panopto. Limitations come with this beta, but it is hoped that these will be phased out with further vendor development.
- Foreign language captions can only be added to videos that are held in a folder which has had its language setting changed to the foreign language required.
- Only one language can be set for a folder, so all videos in said folder will be captioned in the same language – that which is set for the folder.
- Foreign language captions can only be applied to newly recorded or uploaded videos, not those which have been moved or copied from another folder.