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Add captions

There is growing evidence to suggest captioned videos benefit all learners. Accurate captions are vital for deaf and hard of hearing students. Captions also help others, including those whose first language is not English. Adding captions to your video enables viewers to search for sections of the video by keyword.

Captioning options on VIUTube

VIUTube provides automatic, machine generated captions on videos you upload and create. You can edit these captions, or upload a caption file you have created to improve accuracy for all viewers of your content.

When uploading videos to VIUTube, VIUTube will automatically generate and apply captions to your videos. If for any reason your video did not automatically have captions generated for it, you can manually prompt the system to generate some captions for your video by following these steps: 

  1. From your Media Collection, hover over a media thumbnail and select More... to open up the Media Details panel.
  2. Select the Accessibility tab from the left hand side of the screen.
  3. Click on Auto Caption and select the language of the media file to request auto-captioning for, then click Send Caption Request. VIUTube will then begin to generate your captions. 
  4. Click Save Accessibility when done.
  5. Please allow some time for VIUTube to generate your captions. If your captions are not generated after 24 hours, please contact learnsupport@viu.ca for further assistance.  

VIUTube provides the ability for users to upload their own closed-caption files. At the moment, VIUTube supports the following industry standard formats: SRT, XML or WebVTT.

  1. From your Media Collection, hover over a media thumbnail and select More... to open up the Media Details panel.
  2. Select the Accessibility tab from the left side of the screen.
  3. Click on the Upload button and select the Captions option.
  4. Specify the language the captions will be in.
  5. Click Browse to open your file manager. Find and select the closed-caption file from your computer.
  6. Click on Save Accessibility when done.

You can use the Video Editor to edit your computer generated or manually uploaded captions when needed. 

  1. Hover over a media thumbnail and select Edit to launch the Video Editor.
  2. Click the CC button to pull up the auto-captions.
  3. Below is the list of all the available actions you can use:
    • Update the caption timestamps.
    • Edit the caption text.
    • Delete a caption line.
    • Add a new caption line.
  4. Once done, click the Save button to save all the new changes.