Error Report

Return to Main Guide: Managing UDOIT Errors and Suggestions

Synchronized captions should be provided for prerecorded web-based video.

This result may also appear as a suggestion, as discussed in the Cause of Error section.

Why Is This Important?

If videos do not have captions (and audio-only content do not have transcripts), students may be unable to consume the media you've included in your course. With captions (and transcripts) students will be able to consume your media even if the students:

Have a language barrier to overcome
Have environmental constraints to overcome
- Loud airport
- Nursery with sleeping baby
Have poor recording quality to overcome
Have mechanical or biological hearing impairments to overcome

Cause Of Error

This result can appear as an error or a suggestion.

Error - To get the error, you will need to have added a YouTube video or a link to a YouTube video to your course content that has automatically generated captions.
Suggestion - To get the suggestion, you will need to add a non-YouTube video or link to a non-YouTube video to your course. The reason that this generates a suggestion instead of an error is that UDOIT can't detect if a non-YouTube video has captions or not.

Not all videos will be checked by UDOIT. The following will need to be checked manually:

Recordings added with the Record/Upload Media button in the Rich Content Editor toolbar.
YouTube videos that have no captions whatsoever--not even automatically generated captions.
Most video/audio hosted on websites other than YouTube and Vimeo.

Examples

Everyone knows what an uncaptioned video and a captioned video look like, but not everyone understands how automatically generated captions (autocaptions) are insufficient substitutes for man-made captions in most cases. Below is a humorous example of autocaption's poor quality.

Taylor Swift Caption Fail

False Results

There are four ways to get false positives:

(Most Common) A captioned Vimeo video is linked or embedded in your course.
An open-captioned video or video with captions burned into the visuals of the video is linked or embedded in your course (similar to the video above).
A YouTube video using an edited autocaption file instead of a separate, man-made caption file is linked or embedded in your course.
A link containing the word Vimeo in the URL is inserted in your course.

In all of the above cases, the UDOIT error or suggestion may be ignored.

It is also possible to get false negatives for this result. UDOIT primarily examines YouTube and Vimeo videos. The list of videos that need manual auditing and repair can be found in the Cause of Error section.

How To Fix It

There is no U Fix It!, Rich Content Editor, or HTML solution for this issue. There are multiple captioning services available (3Play, Automatic Sync Technologies, Cielo24, Rev, etc.); but if your institution does not use such a service or provide its own service and you are not in a position to fund the captioning yourself, please use the links below to learn how to create your own captions.

Related Standards

Section 508 Quick Reference Guide
Section 508 1194.22b: Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation.
WCAG 2.0 A and AA Reference Guide
WCAG 1.2.2: Captions (Prerecorded)

Last Updated January 2017.
Clemson Online