21 Audio and Video in PowerPoint

Audio Content

• All embedded audio within a PowerPoint file must have captions available.
  • These captions can be automatically generated.
• Macvideo.ca is a fantastic location for audio and video uploads at McMaster that typically creates 95% accurate captions in most cases.
  • These captions can be manually edited once generated to increase the accuracy.
• If your resource is being re-used and/or is public facing, consider editing the captions to be 100% accurate or having it professionally captioned.
• Automatic captions are not as accurate when transcribing accented language or other languages.
• Podcasts need a transcript to be accessible to Deaf-Blind, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing.
• Captions and transcripts also increase accessibility for those who are English Second Language speakers.
• “Burned-In” or “Open” captions are not typically recommended as they cannot be edited in the future or adjusted to meet visual accessibility needs.

Video Content

If content you are sharing does not already have captions, consider the following:

When creating video content, where possible:

• Consider writing a script – this will help with auto-captioning accuracy, improve recording efficiency and can double as a transcript.
• Consider including audio descriptions in your script of what is visually taking place on the screen. This is called Interpreted Description and can reduce the need for described video accommodations.

Resources

• Use YouTube to convert a script into a caption file. (Auto-sync function).
• Convert caption files from SRT to VTT.
• Convert caption files from VTT to SRT.