Captioning and Assistive Technology | University of Montevallo

Captioning

Captioning refers to adding subtitles to media and allows students that are deaf or hard of hearing to participate within an online or traditional classroom setting. Adding captions to your classroom can also be helpful for lesson comprehension, improving literacy, and increasing vocabulary for all students. Captioning services are offered campus wide to faculty through Disability Support Services to ensure that we remain in compliance with the ADA and Section 504. Media that can be submitted include, but are not limited to: DVDs, YouTube Videos, Podcasts, and PowerPoint Presentation or Google slides with narration. In order to ensure that each request is fulfilled in a timely manner, each faculty member must submit a request no less than 3 weeks in advance from when the media is needed. In times of high volume of captioning requests, short-notice captioning may become a “rush captioning request”.

Rush captioning requests with a ‘date needed by’ less than three weeks from the submission date or during high volume times such as late summer or the beginning of a semester may need to be processed through our captioning vendor, which will need to be approved by and charged to the instructor’s department.

The cost of these services are as follows:

Service rate table: Standard turnaround (5 days) $2.50 per minute or $150 per hour. Expedited turnaround surcharge (3 days) $.75 per minute or $45 per hour. Rush turnaround surcharge (2 days) $1.50 per minute or $90 per hour. Difficult audio surcharge $1 per minute or $60 per hour.

The Captioning Request form can be found below.

Captioning Request Form

Using Canvas Studio for Captioning

In Canvas Studio, uploaded media includes auto-generated captions by default. The automatic tool uses technology to transcribe media file language with 85% accuracy. These captions still need to be edited for accuracy.
Instructions for adding and editing auto-generating captions to a media file in Canvas Studio
If you need additional help adding or editing captions for your media, please contact Barbara Ann Lewis in Disability Support Services.

Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology provides an accommodation for students that may require an alternative method of learning than what is typically provided in the traditional classroom. Disability Support Services ensures that each student registered for services obtains the necessary software or assistive device needed to excel academically. We also provide software that can assist faculty with instruction, providing transcriptions of lectures, and adding narrations and quizzes to presentations, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking and Camtasia Studio. Canvas Studio is now embedded in the LMS and provides each user with the tools to auto-caption video. These auto-captions should be reviewed for accuracy before being deployed to viewers.

Disability Support Services has prepared a handbook to help UM faculty and staff better understand assistive technology needs and how to accommodate those.

Each semester a workshop is offered to provide a better glimpse into how each of these software tools can be beneficial to your classroom. Individual trainings are also available. For further information about captioning services or assistive technology, please contact Disability Support Services at (205) 665-6250 or DSS@montevallo.edu.

Don’t forget to search our Carmichael Library streaming services page to find captioned and accessible materials that are ready to add to your courses: https://library.montevallo.edu/streamingvideo

Assistive Technology Resources

Here you will find tools to assist you in making your documents and courses accessible.

Assistive Technology Resources