Date
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Session Type
Poster
Name
Evaluating Automatic Captioning Systems for Improving the Accessibility of Library Video Content
Description

Recent events have resulted in a proliferation of scholarly video content. Conferences, workshops, and course materials are being recorded now more than ever. As librarians endeavor to preserve, describe, and make this important contribution to the scholarly record publicly available, it is essential that this content also be accessible to the widest audience possible. One of the most important things librarians can do to improve the accessibility of video content is to add captions. This poster will explore best practices for creating video captions and analyze the effectiveness of various automatic captioning systems. Automatic captioning systems are becoming better at facilitating the creation of complete, accurate, and readable textual representations of audio content. While these systems are improving, they are often not accurate enough to produce acceptable captions for the hard of hearing. Fortunately, there are steps librarians can take to ensure that video captions accurately reflect the speech and non-speech audio content of media. For example, librarians should strive to create transcripts that are equivalent to audio content by including all speech and non-speech information, including slang, errors, and false starts. This poster will evaluate the automatic captioning features of video platforms like Zoom, YouTube, Kaltura, and others, offering recommendations on how librarians might integrate these tools into their workflows.

Track
Poster