Captioning at UIC
Why?
The Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act guidelines and other laws require synchronized captions for most multimedia at the time the video is posted. There are two exceptions:
- You absolutely know that no person seeing the videos requires captions.
- No action in the video requires captioning. For example, a professor is lecturing without any visual actions and is just talking. In this case a text transcript would still be required of the lecture.
Beyond legal needs, there are other reasons to caption:
- Captioned videos allow for universal access to videos, they are not just for people with disabilities.
- Many people use captions in quiet environments.
- Captioning is useful when English is a person’s second language.
- Captioned videos allow for people using search engines to find specific text from the video.