Instructional Accessibility
Students
Faculty
Recorded and live media have the ability to draw in your audience and convey ideas more vividly. Let's do all we can to include the widest audience by following the basic access principles below.
Audio transcripts
Students that cannot hear a podcast, recorded class lecture, or other audio clip will be excluded from essential content if they are not provided with a text transcript.
Include a text transcript in the simplest file format (Notepad in Windows; TextEdit in macOS) with all the information from the audio recording. Post the transcript file next to the audio clip in any easy-to-find location.
Note: Transcripts can help all students by making the text from audio-only clips searchable.
Pre-recorded video captions
Captioning is one of the most well-known access needs. You can either send your videos out to a third-party service, such as Cielo24, and pay to have your video captioned OR caption videos yourself using Kaltura or YouTube (using YouTube to caption doesn't mean that your videos have to be posted publicly on YouTube).
Note: Captioning someone else's video violates copyright by changing their original content. Cielo24 has a dynamic transcript player that may be a solution in this situation. Their player also has the advantage of creating a searchable transcript.
- See Vanderbilt Brightspace Support's instructions for adding captions using Kaltura
- See YouTube's instructions on captioning with YouTube or view a video on captioning with YouTube
Audio Description for video content
Videos or online meetings with unspoken content (slides, pictures, action without dialog) cannot be understood in an equitable manner by students who cannot see the video. This becomes paramount when instructors assign videos where students are expected to respond to what they've seen.
It's possible that your video doesn't need audio description if all of the visual content is already being described, as in a traditional lecture.
Descriptions guidelines from DCMP Description Tips
Live class meeting captions
Remote class meetings via Zoom (and other services) can have real-time captioning. This function requires working with a 3rd party captioning provider. Please email us at satech@vanderbilt.edu if you have a student accommodation letter from our office that mentions captioning.
Information for this page was adapted from PCC's website and is based on the Creative Commons license.
Recent News
-
Vanderbilt Poll: Post-election, core concerns and views of Tennesseans persist
-
Vanderbilt secures four prestigious NEH grants
-
Vanderbilt’s Keivan Stassun named 2024 MacArthur fellow
-
Quest to develop fully autonomous surgical robot attracts award up to $12 million from ARPA-H
-
Vanderbilt University launches Institute of National Security to counter threats, cultivate leaders