Title: Introduction of a new captioning service

Author: Stephen Donnelly

Theme: Innovation & Creativity in Teaching

In the academic year 21/22, almost 60K items of video were added to Media Hopper Create a total of almost 1.3 million minutes. Captions help everyone but they are essential for those of us who are deaf, hard of hearing or with audio processing disorders. Good captions make materials more accessible for anyone who accesses video without sound. It is crucial for the university to have an efficient means to generate accurate captions so everyone can understand and benefit from our video content.

We aim to improve provision of captions for published media with a new human-finished caption service for high-profile video content across the University.
This poster will outline how you will be able to use the service, why we need to improve the provision of automated and support for human-corrected captioning within the University to comply with legislation and support an accessible and inclusive University experience. We aim to illustrate how our new captioning service will address many of the problems we face.

Currently our different platforms use different captioning software which makes the overall accuracy of automated captions inconsistent and provide different interfaces for content creators who correct captions across the services. The burden on staff to human-finish that quantity of media is currently considerable and so this project has been set up to work on improvements to automated captioning tools and to provide a human finishing service for priority media.

Based on evidence from an earlier pilot in 2016, we know it can take up to 10 minutes to correct one minute of media captions. Our new service will create a dedicated team of Student Caption Editors, working alongside robot colleagues to improve accuracy and develop digital media skills.

Currently only 40% of learning content has automated captions as colleagues are not choosing this option. This suggest more work is needed on culture change towards inclusive teaching.