Kent, Ellis, and Peaty (2017) suggest that captions and transcripts of recorded lectures are of benefit beyond those with a disability they were originally intended for. While this paper was published in 2017, it is very relevant in the COVID-19 era, where lecturers are struggling to communicate to students online. Providing a transcript and captions on videos is an un-glamorous but effective way to improve learning, particularly for students who are not studying in their first language.
ps: I discovered this paper recently because it cites my blog (this blog): Worthington (2015).
Kent and Ellis (2017) suggest that captions for online recorded lectures could benefit all students, not just those with hearing or learning difficulties, or from a non-English speaking background (NESB). These include
older students, diverse learning styles, those in a noisy environment or with older technology. I suggest this could also help for low bandwidth users: in the extreme case a series of still images and text captions could be used in place of video.
However, the report notes that captions or transcripts are not routinely provided (Kent and Ellis, p. 10, 2017). But the only support they provide for this is a blog posting from me (Worthington, 2015).
The report addresses lecture recordings. However, it should be noted that live lectures, webinars, and video-conferences are also capable of being captioned. Commercial services now provide for live captioning via the Internet. A human operator listens to the audio and types the captions in real time.
The approach used by Australian universities is exemplified by the University of Western Australia, which says: "Captions, a transcript or lecture notes for the uploaded video must be published at the same time as the video. Google's auto-caption feature can be used, but the captions must be edited."
However, my impression is that Australian universities mostly provide captions for video materials which are used repeatedly, such as in MOOCs and other packaged on-line courses. One-off lectures are not captioned, nor is a transcript provided, just lecture notes. Presumably universities are relying on the 'unjustifiable hardship' provision in the DDA, to say it would be too expensive and difficult to caption all lecture videos.
But as Marianne Stenger noted, the closed captions can be useful for students generally. In particular these are useful for those with English as a second language. University education is not a cottage industry, it is Australia's fourth largest export and perhaps it is time to provide closed captions for all video lectures.
However, it should be noted that on-line courses do not necessarily require video. Most of the on-line courses I teach and am a student of, do not have video. These courses have text based notes and discussion forums.
