FEMALE: Hey everyone, it's Suzanne Delahanty from
Crafton Hills college Disabled Students Programs and Services.
I am going to do a quick video on a fantastic
tool for doing what's called live captioning.
Now, what that is is if you are actually giving
a presentation or a class discussion or meeting
or actually meeting with colleagues online via a Zoom
meeting or some other thing like Skype or Face Time.
If you have a deaf student, you must have live captioning enabled.
And live captioning is not free with Zoom.
It does cost money to actually have that feature.
Zoom will actually caption your videos for you after you've saved them
and recorded them, but that does take about an hour's delay sometimes.
So, in order to be accessible to our Hard of
Hearing and deaf students, we need some way
to provide actual synchronized captions for
videos that are produced on that in real time.
So I have found a free tool called Web
Captioner and then simply a website that
you go to the main page right here,
I will show you what home looks like.
And there it is.
And it is free captioning right in your browser costs nothing.
You don't even have to setup an account to do it.
But if you do set up an account, you get some added features.
So it's very, very helpful.
It's a non-profit.
A lots of people use it like churches
and organizations who need accessible live content.
So it is a pretty cool product.
I've used it quite a bit now and it is very accurate.
So one thing you use this for is if you're doing
a presentation or meeting with your students
and you for sure know there is somebody who needs
some sort of live captioning as their accommodation.
This is one way that you could very on-the-fly develop this.
So, how do we use this?
So what we're going to do is you simply
just hit Start Captioning.
And right here
you just hit Start Captioning again.
And it is going to be listening for my voice.
It will even tell you if you're speaking too
quietly or too loudly, which is a great feature.
It will take punctuation, periods,
commas and so forth.
And it will very
intelligently sort out your sentences period.
I have found it extremely accurate
for instant captioning as well.
You can create a caption file by using this tool.
And it is a great speech to text tool as well.
So I've had several colleagues at Crafton test this out.
One is in a very scientific, high dense type of vocabulary
class, and they have found it extremely accurate.
So I am very happy to report that.
I'm going to go ahead and stop the captioning.
And so when you're done with that, it will ask you for a donation.
And I think I'm going to donate to them
cuz I think it's so fantastic.
And you can say Save to File and it will
download your entire file down in your web browser.
And if you can see, I'm going to
say, show in my finder and it's going
to show my web caption file, it's going to call it
web caption by the date.
And I will just actually open it from here, so you
can see exactly what it looks like.
So you can go in and edit this, copy this into
a word processor, whatever you'd like to do.
So it is a very accurate and functional tool.
So if you'd like to open an account,
there's all sorts of cool things you could do.
What I love about it is it will censor profane language.
So that's very good for education.
It'll have a sensitivity meter for your voice.
It will allow you to use large navigation
buttons and it will stop or add breaks, if you
actually don't speak for more than a certain
amount of seconds that you can dictate in here.
So another thing that you can do is go in and change the appearance.
And one of the coolest things is that not only does it have a lot
of font choices, as you can see in here, there is a font called OpenDyslexic,
which has been proven to be very friendly for students who
have dyslexia.
We can change the text color, the background color.
And here, you can just select different colors for
whatever need you might have, you change the text size,
spacing and you can even control the capitalization
of the words and make them all uppercase.
And you can also change the alignment of the captions
as well as the background color, the opacity
of the background, you'd like transparency for
your course, if you're doing presentation.
So in a way, it could be sort of like your closed captions live, and you
can make a little box for them at the bottom of the screen, if you'd like.
And there's lots of other features in here.
You can also change language
and you can also sync it to your Dropbox.
So there's a lot of cool features in here, word replacements
if there's lots of errors that come up or technical terms,
you can have it replace it with something that's very specific.
So there are some experiments, experimental features,
we won't go into that, but I think you will find like me,
cuz this is a very useful tool for educators
as well as students who use the dyslexic font.
Now, if I'm all done and I would like to clear my screen, I can do
so right here, and now you're starting with a clean slate again.
So hopefully you will find this a useful tool as I have
as well as a lot of my hearing-impaired students.
They put this up on the screen
if someone has not been able to caption or whatever reason during a
lecture, and it will capture the audio for them right in the browser.
So I wanna remind you though, that is our
responsibility as instructors to produce this
for the student who is not the students who
is Hard of Hearing or deafs responsibility.
That's a federal law, a civil right.
And we need to be cognizant of that.
But I think you'll find that this is a very, very
helpful and accessible tool.
Thank you for listening, you have a great day.