Video Accessibility Guide

Best Practices for Captioning Video Content

• Captioning should follow four basic guidelines:
  • Captions should be accurate.
  • Captions should keep the meaning and intent of the content.
  • Captions should be presented consistently throughout the video.
  • Captions should be clear and complete (Canadian Association of Broadcasters, 2008).
• The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (2008) has a complete captioning guide:
  • https://www.cab-acr.ca/english/social/captioning/captioning.pdf
  • Key Sections:
    • False Starts and Utterances (p. 10)
    • Spelling (p. 11)
    • Punctuation (p. 13)
    • Numbers (p. 15)
  • If your video contains instrumental music provide a description of the music in square brackets.
    • Eg: [classical string music]
  • If your video contains music with lyrics, caption the lyrics with a music note at the start of the caption
    • Eg: ♪ There’s a starman waiting in the sky ♪