Closed captions on Powerpoint help everybody…

On Tuesday, one of my students asked me to put closed captions on my Powerpoint presentation on Zoom. I said yes and the student advised that there would be a small “CC” button down at the bottom.

It was here:

and when I pressed the CC button, it turned red:

I spoke and it worked! And it worked really quite well with white text below the screen. I was pleased.

Sadly, it didn’t work on my colleague’s computer and I couldn’t make it work on one of Cardiff University’s computers but hopefully we can change that.

I’ve been having a play and Powerpoint will do some translation too. You can set your language to English and your subtitles to Welsh:

This help page from Microsoft shows what’s possible in terms of languages.

My opinion is that we should all use closed captions if possible. The educational advice seems quite clear: Gernsbacher1 (2015) says “Video Captions Benefit Everyone” with a very inspiring quote:

Imagine a technique that can improve children’s reading skills (Linebarger, Piotrowski, & Greenwood, 2010), boost adolescents’ written and spoken vocabulary (Davey & Parkhill, 2012), increase college students’ attention to lectures (Steinfeld, 1998), enhance second-language learners’ pronunciation (Mitterer & McQueen, 2009), and raise literacy rates in developing countries (Kothari, Takeda, Joshi, & Pandey, 2002). The technique is simple: Display captions on videos.

This “technique” is available at the push of a single button. Let’s all use this button and facilitate closed captioning!

Here’s another Microsoft page about how to: “Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities” that feels important. A good step this week. Thanks to one of our medical students 🙂

Reference: 

Gernsbacher, MA (2015)”Video Captions Benefit Everyone” Policy Insights Behav Brain Sci. 2015 Oct; 2(1): 195–202. doi: 10.1177/2372732215602130