Lecture transcripts for accessibility

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative lists who reads transcripts: people who are Deaf, people who are hard of hearing, people who have difficulty processing spoken information, and others. In a lecture hall that last group is large. Students studying in a second language, students who lose the thread when a lecturer speaks fast, and students who simply learn better by reading all use transcripts the same way: to go over what was said at their own pace.

You do not have to tell anyone why you want a transcript to use this.

• Text you can read at your own speed, split into paragraphs, with a timestamp at each so you can find the moment in the recording.
• Speaker labels (Speaker A, Speaker B) when more than one person talks, so a question from the audience is not mixed into the lecture.
• Subtitle files (.srt and .vtt) with a time on every line, to show the words under the recording as you watch.
• Plain text you can restyle. Paste it into any app and change the font, size, spacing and colours, or use your device’s read-aloud feature.
• With an hour pack: Word export with a heading every 10 minutes, so Word’s navigation pane lets you jump through a long lecture, and the ability to correct the text on the transcript’s page.

The transcript is made by speech recognition software, not a person. The W3C’s guidance on captions is direct about this: automatic captions do not meet accessibility needs unless they have been checked and found fully accurate, and they usually need real editing. Its example is a single missed “not”, which turns an instruction into its opposite.

What that means in practice:

• Check names, technical terms, numbers and negatives against the slides or the reading before you learn them.
• Words spoken far from the microphone, over noise or over each other are the most likely to be wrong or missing.
• Only the words spoken are written. Sounds, and anything shown on the slides or the board, are not described.

Source: W3C WAI, Captions/Subtitles and Transcripts.

If you need captions, transcripts or a note-taker for your course because of a disability, that is arranged through your university’s disability or accessibility service, and they are the people to ask about what is available to you. Slice does not replace that, and this page is not advice about it. Your lecturer may also be able to turn on captions in the lecture platform; see Panopto, Echo360, Kaltura, Canvas Studio and Zoom lectures for where those are.

Check your course’s recording rules and ask the lecturer. Many lecturers say yes when asked, and recording may already be part of support your university has agreed with you. For a better transcript, sit near the lecturer or the speakers, keep the phone still, and keep it away from fans and projectors.