With our new video platform Kaltura, all content is automatically machine captioned in English. Whoo hoo for captions!
These captions are not perfect and will probably need some human cleanup. There are also some other great caption options you can take advantage of with the Kaltura system. This post will address why to care about captions, how to edit them with the Kaltura platform, and other caption related options and benefits.
Why worry about captions if they are automatically generated?
Auto generated captions are a great first step for accessibility on campus but it doesn’t end there. Machine captions are imperfect so ideally all videos would be human corrected and we realize this takes time and effort. But the benefits are huge and not just for video viewers with disabilities!
Captions benefit anyone
- with hearing impairments
- who needs to watch the video on silent while traveling, etc.
- who wishes to strengthen content retention through watching and reading
- wanting to search the transcript for a specific point in the video
- who wants to download the transcript to read or review offline
These are not all the benefits of captions but the list does highlight how captions for your video content benefits all viewers across campus. Now let’s move on to how to edit the machine captions for a video.
Captions details
First, we have to find the caption file. Choose any video from your My Media library and click the pencil icon to get to the video edit screen.
Now click the Captions tab underneath the video to see a list of caption files and options.
Under the Captions tab, you will see a list of caption files for the video along with other details. This post will address the accuracy percentage and Edit Captions button. For a more detail dive into the other details on this page such as the action icons, please see our Kaltura MediaSpace training page section on captions.
Editing captions
To start editing captions, click the Edit Captions button under the captions tab.
From the dropdown menu at the top, you can choose which caption file you want to edit. On screen you will also see captions with timestamps on the left and a video preview on the right.
You can edit the timestamps and captions for each caption segment. You can also hover over a segment to display a plus icon to add a new segment or the trashcan icon to delete the segment.
If you have made changes that you need to delete, you can click the Revert link in the top right corner to revert back to the original caption file. Or press Save to save you caption changes.
Find and replace captions
One option with Kaltura captions is the find and replace. You can see it on the left side of the screen right above the caption segments.
If there is a word that is consistently wrong in the caption file, you can find and replace all instances at once.
For example, if I am doing a video about Brightspace, the captions may say “bright space” every time. I can type in “bright space” and replace it with “Brightspace” capitalized and with no space just like the software name.
Adding speaker tags
You can also tag speakers in a video. This is especially important for videos with many speakers.
To add speaker tags to the captions, click the checkbox to select all sections that needs a speaker tag. Then add the speaker name to above the captions where it says Add Speaker to selected items. Finally click that Add button to add that speaker name tag to the caption sections.
The added speaker tags will look this with the speaker name in brackets at the beginning of each caption segment.
Remember to click the Save button to save all your speaker tag changes.
Accuracy & why it’s important
After machine captions are generated for a video, the caption file includes an accuracy percentage. This can be a good overall view of how accurate your automatic captions are and the urgency in manually reviewing them. Unless a caption file is specifically set to default, Kaltura will show the file with the highest accuracy.
When you manually edit the captions, it may even decrease your accuracy percentage. We suggest that any time you manually edit captions, you also manually set the accuracy percentage to 100%. This moves them to the top of the list for accuracy and also indicates to you that they have been manually checked.
To change the caption accuracy percentage, click the pencil icon next to the caption file to edit details.
Now you can manually adjust the details of this specific caption file. Change the accuracy to 100% and you can also change the label to remove the [auto] to show they are not machine captions.
Foreign language captions
Foreign language captions are available in
- Spanish
- Italian
- Mandarin Chinese
- French
- German
*Note: This is for captioning in the original language of the video. If you are speaking Spanish in a video for your course, you can caption it into Spanish. This is NOT a translation service.
To generate your video captions in a different language, from the My Media page select the box next to 1 or more videos and then choose Caption & Enrich from the Actions dropdown menu.
From the Caption & Enrich page, you can now choose the language.
- Service dropdown – leave on Machine
- Feature dropdown – leave on Captions
- Source media language – choose the language to generate captions
Now click the Submit button at the bottom of the page.
The new language caption will show up in the caption file list under the video Captions tab when it is complete.
Search & download captions as a transcript
The captions for a video are automatically turned into a transcript. The transcript can be searched right from the player and downloaded or printed for review offline. We won’t go into detail here about using the transcript feature so please see our Kaltura MediaSpace training page section on captions.
As always if you have questions or issues with captioning in Kaltura, please contact the IDAT team for assistance at IDAT@meredith.edu.