Hearing impaired distance students call out for captioned lecture videos
Lecture videos continue to exclude subtitles while disabled distance students struggle to understand content without them.
In recent years, pre-recorded lecture videos have been the main source of information for distance students, who now make up over a third of Massey’s student body.
For former Disability at Massey rep, Eloise Fleming, captions allowed them to “understand what’s being said at a speed similar to most other students”.
Fleming said without captions, they need to “rewind every few seconds”.
Deziree Taylor, a distance student with a hearing impairment said, “Captions or subtitles on lecture videos were incredibly useful [and] enhanced accessibility by aiding with my hearing impairments and struggles with auditory processing.”
Even for students without hearing impairments, captions improved their learning experience, especially when the home environment wasn’t ideal for study.
Landi Cranstoun is raising seven children while studying Sociology, so captions are needed in her noisy household.
Cranstoun said subtitles allowed them to follow along with lecture material when “the noise rose above the threshold with which [they] could reliably hear”.
It kept her from getting confused and rewinding constantly.
However, adding captions to lecture videos could be a time-consuming task, contributing to a lecturer’s already overflowing workload.
Lily Anderson acts as a transcriber under the School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, creating transcripts from recorded interviews to help ease researchers.
She said a 60-minute interview took around three hours to transcribe, even after practicing and finding the best method.
While autogenerated captions could be an easy solution, it appeared that technology had yet to catch up.
Anderson said some of her transcripts came with autogenerated captions, but most of these were “outrageously incorrect”.
It’s not just students who saw the value of captions, as a Massey University spokesperson said, “The university encourages lecturers to provide either a transcript or closed captions for their lectures.”
“In courses where it is known that there is a student with a disability, special arrangements are made”.
“As part of our Disability and Inclusion Action Plan mahi, we will be investigating better captioning options to improve the accessibility of our audio and video materials for all students.”
Until Massey University implements these changes, students are encouraged to use third-party tools that are currently available:
Free tools
Enable Live Captions in Chrome or turn on captions on your iPhone or Android phone
Use your free Microsoft 365 account to create a transcript from an audio recording.
Paid tools
Glean is an audio note-taking app where you can record your notes against live or recorded audio, and they are developing greater transcription and captioning support.