You’ve just finished editing your classroom recording in Studio, added it to your Canvas Page and requested captions to make sure it is accessible. Congratulations! The captions are completed in a few minutes and you begin to review it in the new editor. But hold on! You quickly make corrections for a few mistakes here and there, and you realise that the auto-generated captions didn't quite nail it due to the strong background noise in several parts of the video. Time to delve deeper.
As part of our video accessibility plans, we are thrilled to announce that soon you will be able to request captions for videos in Studio at a human accuracy level. For months now, we’ve been working with transcription services that can provide captions with typically 98%+ accuracy. Additionally, these will support professional translations and audio descriptions (AD) as well in the future.
Why is this important?
In general, we get overwhelmingly positive feedback for Studio’s captioning accuracy. Especially videos created by our webcam or screen recording solution, the accuracy is higher than the average (80%+) machine accuracy for obvious reasons: the speaker is usually speaking close to the microphone in a relatively quiet environment. However, that’s not always the case and a deaf or hard of hearing student will frequently struggle comprehending the subject. Some of these cases:
- Poor audio quality (e.g. noisy classroom, mic is far from the instructor, they are moving around)
- Instructor is speaking with thick accent (an accent that is less familiar to the auto-captioning system)
- Speaker is speaking quickly, they are mumbling or the voice is muffled
- The speech contains domain specific language (e.g. highly technical)
- There are multiple speakers
Am I a good candidate for Early Access?
We understand that professional captioning comes with an extra cost for institutions. That's why we're initially reaching out to those of you who already use certain professional or human captioning services to gather feedback. You will be able to quickly integrate it with Studio, order professional captions for your videos, review them on a separate dashboard, and decide whether to approve or reject them.
If your institution doesn't currently utilise professional captioning but is interested in exploring it, we strongly encourage you to fill out the following form as well. By doing so, you'll be among the first to receive updates and details about the upcoming release.
Take me to the form! (approx. 1 min)
Take care,
Akos
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