Cagey Captioning Can't Cut It

I attended a webinar this week that featured Paul Grossman who served as the Chief Attorney for the Office of Civil Rights in San Francisco for 30 years. He now teaches Disability Law at the University.

He was talking us through the legal year in review for 2015. One of the scary things for higher education institutions these years is the prolific video creation and usage by professors and the expensive need to caption those videos for the deaf and hard of hearing populations.

Although captioning has been proven to be helpful in so many ways...improving results with search engines, useful in noisy environments, providing double input into the brain which increases retention, clarification of the language for non-native English speakers, assistance for read/write learners who don't learn well by just listening, as well as those with hearing limitations...it is still not the norm for videos used in the classroom.

Some people are still trying to use automatic captions created on the fly by transcribing software. Although it is amazingly accurate at 80 to 95 percent. That last inaccurate percentage changes the whole meaning of the language making it unusable to the non-hearing public. Just do a search on all the humorous videos on YouTube showing inaccurate auto-captioning. Not cuttin' it.