Multimedia Services is pleased to announce that automated captioning is now provided for all video that is uploaded or recorded to Mediasite. Captioning will be provided by the AI captioning service Vidable; this will ensure that Rensselaer is in compliance with requirements stating that all offered video must be captioned for those who are deaf or hard of hearing. An article by Sonic Foundry discusses the benefits of the Vidable service for Mediasite.
 
Multimedia Services has tested and reviewed the accuracy of the AI captions provided by Vidable, and, in general, they are excellent. However, they may not always be not perfect, so a video's owner may manually edit the captions if they wish.  Instructions on how to do this are available in ITSSC.
 
While captions have already been added to many past events and courses in Mediasite, they have not been added to MyMediasite content prior to March 1, 2023. Again, video owners can refer to ITSSC for instructions on how to use Vidable automation to add captions to any video. If video owners have a large backlog of videos which need to have captions added, they should reach out to the Mediasite support team by creating a support request, making sure to include their RCS userID and which videos need to be captioned.
 
For all captioned videos, the viewer can choose to turn captions on and off, as well as select how those captions will appear on the screen. Information on how to adjust caption settings is available via Mediasite.
 
Transcripts, which consist of the caption text without time stamps, are also available for all captioned videos, but transcript download is currently only available to the owner of the video through the MyMediasite portal; please see Downloading a Transcript for more information. Note, however, that the ability for viewers to download transcripts is planned for a future release of the Mediasite cloud platform.
 
If you have any questions about captions and transcripts in Mediasite, Multimedia Services' support team would be happy to help. Please create a support request and one of their team members will get back to you.