Video Captioning

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.
• 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 Owned/Hosted by Others

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

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.

How to Submit Your Videos

If you have not already filled out a Captioning Request Form, please do so now. After your request is submitted, you will receive an email from your campus coordinator, who will share with you a Google folder where you will upload your video files.

You can submit requests for videos in English or in a foreign language. In addition to the closed captions, you will receive video transcripts. As a reminder, please do not submit videos that:

• Have no sound (i.e. silent films), or contain only instrumental music with no lyrics.
• Are one-time or limited-use videos.
• Are at risk of being pulled from YouTube for copyright violation.

If you use a video in multiple courses, please only submit it once.

After you submit your captioning request, you will receive an email from your campus coordinator, who will create a Google folder where you will upload the video files you have stored on your computer/local drive or a cloud service.

This video (1:58) provides instructions for placing your files in the Google Folder:

Sharing Files Via Google Folder

What You Will Need

• A link to the Google folder. You will obtain this after you submit your captioning request.
• Your videos that need captioning.

Add Video Files to the Folder

1. Open the Google Drive folder.
2. Find the video files you want to add from your computer.
3. Drag them from your computer and drop them into the Google Drive Folder. Note: it may take a few minutes for the videos to upload, depending on their size.
4. Email your campus coordinator that the folder is ready and available.

See the topics Using Canvas Studio, Using 3CMedia Solutions, and Using YouTube and Other Public Sites for information specific to those services.

Setting Up Canvas Studio and Building Your Library

In this video you'll learn how to set up Canvas Studio in your course (0:00 to 0:27) and begin building your Studio library (0:28 to 0:59).

Editing Auto-Generated Captions

Studio generates automatic captions for all video files you upload to Studio. However, these captions are not automatically published. Please review and edit the auto-captions before you publish. The following video (1:44) explains how to do it.

Note: Canvas has updated Studio so that now the closed captions can be turned on by clicking on the CC symbol, which is easier to recognize than a toggle button. Please update this information on your Canvas pages as needed.

Requesting Closed Captions

For your videos stored in Canvas Studio, you can also request captioning. This is a good option if your video lectures are long, you have a large number of videos, and editing the auto-generated captions would require too much time. You will need to download those video files from Studio and share them via a Google folder as described under Submitting Videos You Own or Have.

The video below (0:39) shows you how to download your Studio videos.

Download Videos from Canvas Studio:

1. Go to Studio in the navigation menu.
2. Find the video you want to download and click View.
3. Click the three vertical dots on the right side of the video while in view mode and select Download. The video will be downloaded to your downloads folder.
4. Once all videos have been downloaded share them via a Google Drive folder.

Adding a YouTube or Vimeo Video to Studio

Because you do not have the ability to upload caption files to other people's YouTube accounts, you will need to place those YouTube videos within Studio (or 3CMedia) so that the caption overlay can be put in place. The video below (0:25) shows you how to add a YouTube video to your Studio library.

Embedding Studio Videos in Canvas

To make your Studio content available for you students, you'll need to embed it in a Page, Announcement, or other content delivery method using the Canvas Rich Content Editor (RCE). The video below (1:55) shows you how to embed your videos using this tool.

If you have your own YouTube account, the choice is yours on how to submit your videos. You can either:

• Provide copies of the original video files as shown in the Google Drive demonstration, or
• You can submit the URLs for the video as demonstrated in the Public Sites tutorial.

Setting up your 3CMedia Account

The video below (1:17) shows you how to set up your 3CMediaSolutions account from within Canvas.

Uploading Media to Your Account

The video below (2:10) shows how to upload a video to your 3CMedia account. If you do not yet have a 3CMedia account, please set one up via the instructions in the video above.

Adding YouTube Videos to 3CMedia

Because you do not have the ability to upload caption files to other people's YouTube accounts, you will need to place your YouTube videos within 3CMedia (or Canvas Studio) so that the caption overlay can be put in place. The following video (1:05) shows you how to do it.

Captioning 3C Media Videos

You can request captions in 3CMedia or through your campus coordinator. The following tutorials explain your options for captioning and transcriptions.

Requesting Captions in 3CMedia

If copies of your videos files are stored in 3CMedia, you can request human-generated captions directly in 3CMedia. As of Fall 2023, 3CMedia provides captions (but not transcripts) for instructor videos.

The following video shows how to request captions directly in 3C Media.

Submitting a Caption Request Through Your Campus Coordinator

For videos that cannot be captioned in 3CMedia or if you would like to request video transcripts, go to your 3CMedia account, retrieve a link to the appropriate video, and submit that link in a Google sheet. This will be created by your campus coordinator and shared with you after you submit your captioning request. You can also download your video files and upload them in a Google folder.

Both methods for sharing your 3CMedia videos are demonstrated in the video below (1:59).

Uploading Your Caption Files to 3CMedia

The video below (0:43) shows you how to upload caption files to your 3CMedia videos. If you're not familiar with 3CMedia but are interested in using it, please see Using 3CMedia.

Embedding 3CMedia Content In Canvas

To make your 3CMedia content available for you students, you'll need to embed it using the Canvas Rich Content Editor (RCE). This tool is available within Canvas Pages, Announcements, Assignments, etc. The video below (1:17) shows you how to embed using this tool.

Using Your Personal YouTube Account

The following video tutorials explain how to submit videos for captioning and now to upload caption files to your personal YouTube account.

Submitting Videos from Your YouTube Account

If you have your own YouTube account, the choice is yours on how to submit your videos. You can either provide copies of the original video files (see the topic Submitting Videos You Own or Have), or you can submit the URLs for the video as demonstrated in the tutorial below.

Uploading Caption Files to Your YouTube Account

This video (0:45) shows you how to upload caption files to your personal YouTube account.

Submitting Caption Requests for Videos on Public Sites (YouTube)

If you are using publicly hosted videos that need caption remediation, you will submit links to those videos via a spreadsheet you'll receive from our captioning team. The process for submitting those links is described in the video (2:39) below. If you're not sure if these videos need remediating, please see the topic Identifying Videos for Captioning.

Other Scenarios

It's possible you have a situation not addressed in the videos above. If this is the case, your campus coordinator will work with you one-on-one. If you have not done so already, please fill out the Captioning Request Form and describe your situation there. Someone from our team will contact you soon.