Closed Captioning Services

Increase Content Accessibility with Closed Captioning Services

The process of displaying the text form of the audio portion from a program, either on a video screen or television or any other visual display, is called closed captioning. Closed captions do not include dialogues alone, but it also covers the description of the background sounds.

The closed captions are displayed on the screen along with the video images. This makes it easy for the audience to access the video while reading the closed captions. Indeed, captions help hard of hearing or deaf individuals, but still, have many more benefits. Good online closed captioning services focus on considering sound effects and music while writing the captions. Including background sound gives a better user experience to the viewer in understanding the context of the video.

Closed caption service is different from open captions. The main difference is that the open captions are added permanently to a video and cannot be turned off on user requests. On the other hand, the closed captions are added temporarily, in a separate file. These can be turned on and off as per the viewer’s requirements.

Accurate video closed captioning services are important for accessibility. There can be many situations when the viewer is not able to listen to the video such as noisy environments, hearing disabilities, volume off, etc. and you don’t want to settle with captions with errors. Inaccurate captions can decrease the viewer engagement.

Steps for Quality Closed Captioning Service

There are five important steps that a good captioning agency should follow to get high-quality content. These are:

Offline Closed Captioning Services

Offline captioning is a type of closed captioning services in which the captions are added to the pre-recorded files. Already recorded material such as DVD’s video files, or the Facebook and YouTube videos, which have been posted in the past, are being captioned in this service. Vanan Captioning currently supports only offline closed captioning services.

What are Closed Captioning Services?

Closed captioning services provide the hearing-impaired individuals an opportunity to enjoy videos even without sounds. Closed captioning services are done by professional captioners, who add texts for the sounds and interactions present in a video. These texts provided by closed captioning services are termed ‘closed captions’ and can be enabled or disabled as per the user’s convenience.

Importance of Closed Captioning Services

Closed captioning services are extremely important to this digital world. More than 95 million Americans depend upon the closed captioning services while viewing a program. Out of which, 28 million have hearing impairment, 30 million don’t speak English as their first language or are learning English as their second language. More than 27 million of these individuals are adults who are trying to improve their literacy skills and 10 million are children learning how to read.

All this along with the FCC guidelines makes it mandatory to add closed captions to all the programs.

Literacy Improvement with Closed Caption Service

It’s sad, but there are more than 42 million American adults who are illiterate. More than 50 million are there who can’t read higher than the 4th-grade level. These numbers are not decreasing because most of the adults in the United States do not read books instead, they prefer watching television. And this is the fact that brings closed captioning services into the picture.

All these individuals are now able to read at the time of watching their favorite shows, simply with a click of a button. As per a study, children who watch television with closed captions turned on, have better educational achievements and higher literacy rates.

Multiple Arenas of Captioning

From corporate industries to entertainment sources, we adhere to time-synchronized professional captioning services to 15+ video footage, including:

Different Styles of Closed Captioning

Vanan Captioning offers broadcast captioning services and other type of closed captioning services in the following styles:

Format Support for Closed Captioning Services

We support multiple file formats to make things easy for you. The file formats supported by us are:

.M4A, .M4B, .M4V, .RA, .RM, .QT.XML, .QTSMIL, .SMI, .ASX

ADA & FCC for Captioning Services

ADA

ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became a law in the year 1990. It sets a landmark for accessibility requirements. ADA wants handicap ramps to be made in the buildings for easy access. ADA demands that all the auxiliary aids have to be made available to all who are disabled. When it comes to deaf and hard of hearing or hearing-impaired individuals, they need closed captions for all the videos, short films, movies, etc. ADA doesn’t specifically address online videos, but captioning is required to make these accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing population.

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) takes care of the communication via radio, television, internet, etc. FCC maintains the standards for the communication methods protecting the media and related businesses.

FCC has made numerous rules mandatory for online videos to make up the closed captioning rules for content. FCC’s rules also apply to the online videos that appeared on the television in the past. A few things that FCC controls are –