Captions and Kaltura in brief

In Kaltura, you can add captions to videos, edit them and use multiple language versions for the same video. Captions improve the accessibility of videos and make content easier to follow in different viewing situations. You can import captions created in another application, create captions manually, or order captions in Kaltura using the REACH service.

Before adding captions, it is recommended that you finish editing the video first so that you do not need to adjust caption timings afterwards.

Are you using another tool? See this Digipedagocial guide for the captioning tools supported at HAMK: How to create captions yourself

Captions and accessibility

At HAMK, videos should generally be captioned when they are published for students or other audiences as part of teaching, guidance or other online content.

Captions must be readable and should not cover other essential visual content in the video. At HAMK, the recommended solution is Closed Captions (CC), because viewers can turn the captions on or off themselves.

Automatically generated captions should not be published without review. The publisher must check and correct them before publication. Captions do not need to be perfect, but they must be easy to read, correctly timed and should not create misunderstandings in relation to the spoken content.

Translated captions (subtitles) are a useful service and are often needed, but accessibility requirements only require captions in the language spoken in the video.

Learn more about captioning: Practical tips for accessible video captioning

In brief:

• Spoken content in prerecorded synchronised media (video) must be captioned when the video is published.
  
  
  
• In addition to speech, captions should include other sounds and soundscapes that are essential for understanding the content.
• A recording of a live broadcast must be made accessible by adding captions within 14 days of publication.

Adding a caption file

In Kaltura, captions are added to a video as a separate caption file. This is the recommended method because captions are displayed clearly in the video player, and viewers can adjust settings such as font size and colour or turn the captions off if they wish.

Kaltura supports caption files in SRT, VTT, DFXP and XML formats. The same video can contain several different caption tracks, for example captions in the spoken language, translated captions (subtitles) and SDH captions designed for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Editing captions

In Kaltura’s caption editor, you can add, delete and correct text, adjust the timing of captions and add speaker identifiers.

Before publishing, you can edit any caption track associated with the video, whether it was created manually, generated automatically or imported from another application. The changes you make are reflected both in the captions displayed in the Kaltura video player and in the transcript window that can be opened alongside the video.

Watch the tutorial video on importing and editing a caption file (Kaltura, sign-in required).

Creating captions in Kaltura or with another tool

Captions can be created in another application and imported into Kaltura as a file, or they can be edited using Kaltura’s caption editor. You can also order automatic captions in the video’s spoken language for a video uploaded to Kaltura using the Kaltura REACH tool.

With Kaltura REACH, automatic same-language (spoken language) captions can be ordered in the following languages: Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Kaltura REACH’s speech-to-text feature uses the Whisper language model. Ordering automatic captions is a useful option when you want to quickly create a first version of the captions and then review and finalise them in the editor.

If you need English translation captions from one of the languages listed above, you can use the Subtitle Edit tool: Subtitle Edit – AI-assisted video captioning (Kaltura, sign-in required. Duration 53:14)

Automatically generated captions should always be reviewed before publication so that any speech recognition errors can be corrected.

Watch the tutorial video on ordering captions using Kaltura REACH (Kaltura, sign-in required).