Occasionally, for copyright or technical reasons, we may not be able to caption your video. Before showing it, check to see if the video already has captions (sometimes called subtitles”). Commercial DVDs almost always have captions, and Canada and the US have rules mandating captions for online videos that have been previously broadcast on television including news programs, sports and ads.

If captions aren’t available – or worse, they’re unusable like some of those auto-generated by YouTube – here are some tips on how to find a video with suitable captions:

• In the case of commercially-produced movies or TV shows, check with the library’s Accessibility Support team to see if they have or can obtain a captioned copy.
• Try a different online source. If you’re planning on showing a Super Bowl commercial that’s on YouTube, for instance, try looking for the official channel of the broadcaster, advertiser or ad agency. These sources are more likely to have properly captioned versions of the video than just a popular YouTube user who has posted the ad for fun.
• Contact the content channel creator. If they own the rights to the video they have posted, they can give you permission to have it captioned and we can take care of it. Keep in mind, however, that even if we create captions and send them to the content creator, it’s no guarantee that they’ll post them in a timely manner. In the case of YouTube, asking the content channel owner to turn on community contributions will give us the ability to upload the caption files ourselves.
• Select another appropriate video that has captions.
• If no appropriate captioned video can be found and rights to caption cannot be obtained, request a transcript of the video from the Accessible Media Department. This transcript can be posted on Blackboard as part of the lesson and downloaded by any student who may require it.