Request professional captions for accessibility requirements

All audio and video produced at UTS can make use of machine captioning, which uses machine learning to produce captions that are synced to the audio track on playback, and have an accuracy rate of around 90-95%.

While this is a good starting point for general situations, and can be manually edited by the content owner to improve accuracy, some students have identified requirements which means the accuracy must be 100%. In these situations, the University has access to a professional captioning service via the Accessibility Service, where people can oversee the generation of captions to ensure they meet the 100% accuracy standard.

As there are additional costs involved with professionally produced captions, access to this service requires pre-authorisation and moderation. If special requirements apply to your subject, a representative from Accessibility will generally contact you first. However, if a student has come to you directly, please contact accessibility@uts.edu.au to make arrangements.

Professional captions are managed through the Kaltura media platform, available in Canvas. The professional captions workflow largely mirrors the process of working with any other media files.

The first step is to upload your videos to Kaltura. You can do this by uploading a video or audio file produced by any program, or you can produce new recordings directly with Kaltura Capture. The resources below contain instructions for uploading your content:

• Uploading your media files to Canvas with Kaltura My Media [LX Guide]
• Making screen and webcam recordings with Kaltura Capture [LX Guide]

If you need additional help with this, you can contact the LX.lab for support.

To request captions, open the relevant video or audio file via My Media, according to the instructions for accessing My Media in the links listed above. Once you’ve clicked on your media, on the Media Information screen:

1. Open the Actions menu and
2. Select + Caption & Enrich

Next:

1. Select the dropdown menu under Service.
2. Change to Professional.
3. Leave all Professional default settings as they are and click Submit.

Upon submission, your request will go to a UTS moderator for approval. Once approved, captions should be delivered within 48 hours. You will receive notice once your caption request is approved or rejected, and again once they are ready. You can check the status of any requests at any time by revisiting this page:

Once you have requested your professional captions, share the video with your class. Instructions for adding videos to your Canvas page can be found at:

• Adding your media to a Canvas page with Kaltura Browse and Embed [LX Guide]
• Kaltura in UTS Online [UTS Online Help]

Professional captions can take up to 48 hours to complete, while machine-produced automatic captions are ready after about half an hour. At present, machine captions must be manually requested, which you can do by repeating the above steps and selecting Machine as the source.

You might like to request machine captions as a placeholder while you are waiting for the professional captions to be created. In this case, let the student know that there may be some minor errors in the machine captions, but that the professional captions are on their way.

Very soon, UTS will be changing the system so that all media in Kaltura will receive automatic captioning on upload. This may have implications for how the student chooses between professional and machine captioning.

We will update this section with more information once the new configuration is available.