Closed captions are an important learning tool for people with disabilities.

Closed Captions-Crucial for Students With Disabilities

Closed captions or CC are popular and are useful for all. With closed captions available in videos, it provides us the extra option of turning it on or off. Closed captions were initially designed to help people having hearing difficulties. Later, in the US, there came the law under section 504 where all educational videos must be captioned to help people with disabilities. After this law was introduced, all educational institutions right from kindergarten to universities had to have captions for the educational video contents. Closed captioning allows all students to be benefited and not just a few. People usually get confused with captions and subtitles as they are the same but there is a difference among them. Subtitles are just plain text whereas closed captions contain all the minor details in the video and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers, their manner of speaking, significant music, sound effects and other background noises.

How can closed captions be useful for students with disabilities?

Teaching a group of students with disabilities is not an easy job, they must make sure that all the students have gained knowledge about the topic. Teachers use various techniques to give their best to these students.

Videos with captions have multiple benefits. It helps students to follow the class without losing concentration.

Globally, there are thousands of students with disabilities such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD. These students will find it difficult to watch the videos and register what they watched. They tend to not follow the video with concentration, forget the content or loose interest in the video. But, with the help of closed captions, it makes it easier for them to sit through the video. These students can read the text displayed and understand the video better. Sometimes, children find it embarrassing to repeatedly ask the teachers for doubts. Closed captions can save them from such embarrassment.

Also, students with hearing disabilities can make no sense of any video without captions. Therefore, captions play a mandatory role in cases of dealing with hearing impaired people.

Further, every one of us have different accents and some students may catch it while some may not. So, with captions, accent doesn’t matter. Students from different nations can be exposed to all kinds of video contents with the help of closed captions.

Moreover, even if the audio quality in the video is bad, it makes it all the more difficult for people with disabilities to understand the content. Hence, closed captions play an important role here as well.

Next, when new words or technical terms are used, with captions, it is easy to grasp those. Students can easily note down the spelling and find the meaning for better understanding.

Most importantly, captions help to improve focus by allowing the students to read the text as the video is being played. With video, audio and captions being displayed at the same time, it keeps the concentration of the students at a high level.

Conclusion

Closed captions for students with disabilities is inevitable, specially, because it is mandatory by law. Hence, for any video content that you create, it is best advised that you get in touch with a transcriptions and captioning service provider such as Visual Subtitling who provides accurate, cost-effective and quick captioning services.

Conclusion

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