All videos used in LRCCD courses must contain ADA compliant captioning. The Los Rios campus coordinators can request ADA compliant captioning for your course videos thanks to the DECT Grant from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office.
How To Identify If a Video Requires Captioning
Do not submit videos that:
- Have no sound (i.e., silent films) or contain only instrumental music with no lyrics. If you wish to request audio descriptions, please contact your UDA coordinator.
- Are one-time or limited-use videos.
- Are at risk of being pulled from YouTube for copyright violation.
Keep in mind:
- Even if you use a video in multiple courses, please submit the captioning request only once.
- You can submit videos for an entire course at the same time or at different times. Please keep in mind that captions take between two to three weeks.
- You can submit captioning requests for multiple courses at the same time.
- Foreign-language videos will be captioned in the original language. No English translation is provided.
If you have not already done so, please fill out the brief Captioning Request Form.
Videos You Own or Have
If you have video files (.mp4, .mov) created by yourself or others and you haven't manually captioned them, they'll need captions built. You'll share these files with your captioning team by way of a shared Google Folder.
Please see the topic Submitting Videos You Own or Have for instructions on how to submit those video files.
If you're using videos hosted on sites like YouTube, your first step is to identify whether they contain accurate, compliant captioning. Auto-generated captions are not considered good enough and will need to be fixed. They are generated by software that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and are only about 85% accurate and include no punctuation and capitalization. By law, captions need to be 99% accurate, which at this time can only be accomplished by human captioners.
To see if your videos are auto-captioned:
- Click the "cc" button in your video player.
- If the captions indicate "auto-generated" or similar (as below) you will need to submit the video for captioning. Add these videos to your list to submit.
- Similarly, if the video player contains no "cc" button, then there are likely no captions and you will need to submit the video for captioning.
- Some videos on public sites have already been properly captioned. For these videos, "auto-generated" will not appear on the screen, as shown in the image below:
These captions have likely been manually created or edited thus meaning they have a better chance of being accurate. Please check these videos for accuracy, paying special attention to capitalization, punctuation, and correct spelling of difficult words, technical terms or proper nouns. If the captions are accurate, there is no need to submit the video. If you see inaccuracies in the captions, please add the video to your list for submission.
This brief video (2:57) explains this process in more detail:
Identifying Auto-Generated Captions
Got Questions?
Contact your college's Universal Design and Accessibility (UDA) Coordinator or check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.