HOW TO: Add closed captions to a presentation

Captions help make video content more accessible to your viewers. Mediasite offers several ways to add closed captions to your video presentation. The options below can be thought of as either "high touch," where there is little to no financial cost but the demands on your time and effort are high, or "low touch," requiring very little of your time and effort but at a greater financial cost.

Use Mediasite automatic captions

In most cases, Mediasite will automatically create captions whenever you add a video presentation, and even if a presentation does not have captions, you can still apply automatic captions yourself.

Mediasite's automatic captions use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to create the caption transcript. Depending on the complexity of the video's audio, ASR captions may contain transcription errors you must review and correct to ensure the captions are accurate.

Apply automatic captions to an existing Mediasite presentation

Edit automatic captions for accuracy

Create captions from scratch

While it may be time consuming, you may opt to manually transcribe and caption a Mediasite presentation from scratch. This may be an appropriate choice for especially complex or challenging content. Simply remove any existing captions and manually create new captions from scratch using Mediasite's built-in caption editor.

Create closed captions using Mediasite's caption editor

Add existing captions

Some video content vendors and services will provide captions with their video content, or maybe you have created captions for a video outside of Mediasite. When you upload these videos to Mediasite, you can also add the existing captions.

Add existing captions to a Mediasite presentation

Purchase professional third-party services

Several third-party professional services offer an easy integration between their services and Mediasite. While more expensive than the do-it-yourself options, these service providers generally provide higher-quality captions and can greatly reduce the time required to review and edit captions. Professional services are recommended for formal accessibility accommodations. They are also ideal for situations where you need accurate transcription and captioning of a lot of content in a short period of time.

Order captions from a third-party vendor