Creating captioned video in the Modern Workplace

• The thought of creating captioned video at work fills most people with dread but the benefits are clear;
• 80% of [Facebook] video is watched with the audio off.
• Captioned video extends reach to people with, for example, English as a second language.
• Transcripts are extremely useful to use elsewhere and for translations.
• Captions are useful for all when your presenter has a strong accent or when they're using specialist terminology.
• You mitigate risk by meeting accessibility requirements.

The good news is that it's getting easier than ever before to achieve. Auto-captioning is getting better all the time. While not perfect, editing is often quick and easy to do.

For the casual video creator, there are some great apps for your phone that allow you to embed captions in recorded video. I use ClipoMatic on my iPhone but there are plenty of others out there. It produces great results with full editing in app. Here's a quick example I posted recently coming out of a meeting in London. It's worth noting that I had no special mic or recording set up (you can tell from the production values). I was just walking through Whitehall speaking to my phone. Some quick edits on the Tube and I was done.

However, this is not a great option for those looking to add captions to existing material or those looking to generate useful transcript.

That's where Microsoft Stream comes in. We first came across Stream in a meaningful way when it became the default video repository for Microsoft Teams meeting recordings. You can also upload existing video. It offers a transcription service by default in English and Spanish. You can edit in line as the video plays and you can download a .vtt caption file.

Alt: screenshot of Microsoft Stream, highlighting the edit transcription icon

Downloading the edited caption file is so useful. I now use it for accurate captions in Youtube, Windows, Linkedin and, perhaps most usefully PowerPoint! It's amazing how many people don't know that the most used presentation software on the planet supports captions! In fact, I'm sure that often people resort to linking to online videos just to leverage captions. It's much more reliable to have your device offline in conference presentations! How many talks have you sat through where the presenter jumps out to their browser to show a video, only to be stymied by the conference wifi?

(You may need to convert your caption file from .vtt to srt but there are plenty of simple tools online to do this.)

Alt: screenshot of Office365 Powerpoint, highlighting the video playback Insert Captions option.

Back to Stream, all of your employees can access the mobile app on the move. I regularly watch training on my daily commute, often with no audio. If you're watching video content in your browser, you can also make use of a translation extension to dynamically convert your newly leveraged text!

Alt: Screenshot of Microsoft Stream, viewed in the Edge browser translated to Russian.

Videos posted in Stream are searchable by voice! You can jump straight to the part of the video where a keyword is spoken. You can search your entire estate for keywords. I often browse to explore who is talking about "accessibility" in-house! Good accessibility almost always unlocks productivity.

If you want to create a "burned-in" captioned video (mp4) that you can share everywhere without fear of user error, then how about using the Windows 10 built-in capture tool - Game Bar? Pressing Windows Key G opens up this tool. You will need to enable app audio recording. From there, you can start screen recording (Windows Key Alt R) while playing back the video. Here's an example of what you end up with.

In summary, take some time to explore;

1. Clipomatic, Clips, Autocap (Android) on your mobile
2. Microsoft Stream
3. Powerpoint Captions Support
4. Powerpoint Subtitles for presenters
5. Game Bar for screen recording

There are many other tools that people use to author captioned content. However, we want accessibility tools to be readily available to all. Increasingly, as organisations move to Windows 10/Office 365, these features will be discovered by more and more people, hopefully leading to more "accessible by default" content.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft accessibility - please visit www.microsoft.com/accessibility

If you want to suggest accessibility features, please visit our User Voice forum