WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Thread: Accuracy rates go captioning and transcription

for

Number of posts in this thread: 2 (In chronological order)

From: Weissenberger, Todd M
Date: Sun, Oct 21 2018 6:49AM
Subject: Accuracy rates go captioning and transcription
No previous message | Next message →

Colleagues,

Occasionally I hear about groups (on my campus and elsewhere) who are working to develop automated captioning and transcription tools.

I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts on automated captioning, any success stories (or cautionary tales), cost/benefit analyses between automated and outsourced captioning, and especially what degree of accuracy would be sufficient (and is currently achievable) for such tools.

I look forward to your thoughts on this.

Todd

T.M. Weissenberger
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology Services
University of Iowa
319-384-3323

From: Emily Ogle
Date: Sun, Oct 21 2018 9:39AM
Subject: Re: Accuracy rates go captioning and transcription
← Previous message | No next message

You would need to achieve 97% accuracy or comprehension starts to suffer. Additionally automated closed captioning tends to caption one word at a time, which leads to the effect of watching the captions rather than the video.

Deaf/hard of hearing *hate* auto captions(myself included). YouTube provides the option to generate closed captioning, but Google won't index autocaptions given their high rate of inaccuracy; you have to fix them or upload before Google will include them in search results.

The best approach is anything that is autogenerated is checked by a human for accuracy. There's a caveat here, too, though: people can sometimes hear what they see and not realize there's an inaccuracy. Once transcripts have been fixed for accuracy, they should go through a timing program where best practices for caption display are followed.

Development on a generation tool would be ongoing. It depends on your long-term plan whether the costs to develop a tool outweighs the existing vendors out there. Two that I know of use a combination of human/technology: Automatic Sync Technologies and 3PlayMedia. Both have prices per minute 2.25-2.75 and have video description services as well.

Emily

> On Oct 21, 2018, at 7:49 AM, Weissenberger, Todd M < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> Colleagues,
>
> Occasionally I hear about groups (on my campus and elsewhere) who are working to develop automated captioning and transcription tools.
>
> I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on automated captioning, any success stories (or cautionary tales), cost/benefit analyses between automated and outsourced captioning, and especially what degree of accuracy would be sufficient (and is currently achievable) for such tools.
>
> I look forward to your thoughts on this.
>
> Todd
>
> T.M. Weissenberger
> IT Accessibility Coordinator
> Information Technology Services
> University of Iowa
> 319-384-3323
> > > >