Improving the Accessibility of Online Instruction
Last week I received an email from a reader who was looking for advice about adding subtitles to presentations in Zoom meetings. That request prompted me to pull up some tutorials on subtitling presentations and creating transcripts of video presentations. These are my recommendations for improving the accessibility of Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams presentations.
Zoom
Unfortunately, Zoom doesn’t offer a native tool for automatic subtitling of presentations. Update: shortly after publishing this a few folks emailed to say that Zoom does have a new captioning option built into it. You have to enable that option in your account settings under the “advanced” options. Additionally, you can type subtitles or enlist the help of expensive third party services to do it for you.
If you use PowerPoint or Google Slides while presenting in Zoom you can utilize the automatic subtitling tools built into PowerPoint and Google Slides. Simply enable the subtitles then do a full screen-share your Zoom meeting so that your students can see the subtitles. Watch this tutorial video to learn how to enable automatic subtitles in Google Slides and in PowerPoint.
Microsoft Teams
The desktop, education version of Microsoft Teams has a built-in tool that will automatically subtitle your meetings. It’s important to note that your account is on the latest version of Microsoft Teams in order for the automatic subtitles to work. Here’s a video from Mike Tholfsen (Microsoft EDU product manager) demonstrating how to enable automatic captions in Microsoft Teams.
If your version of Microsoft Teams doesn’t have the automatic subtitles feature available, you can use the method of using automatic subtitles in PowerPoint and then screen-sharing your presentation.
Google Meet
Google Meet has offered a native subtitling function for quite a while. What’s great about Google Meet’s subtitling tool is that it works throughout your meeting whether you’re screen-sharing or not. It’s also great because students can turn it on or turn it off for themselves. That’s one of ten Google Meet features that all teachers should know how to use. All ten are featured in this video tutorial.
Recently, I started using a new Google Chrome extension called Caption Saver. Caption Saver will automatically turn on captioning when you launch a Google Meet. Additionally, Caption Saver will create a transcript of your Google Meet meetings. Here’s a short overview of how to use Caption Saver to save a transcript of your Google Meet meetings.
Professional Development Opportunities
- I spent the weekend leading professional development webinars for the faculty of a community college in California. If you’re interested in having me host professional development for your school, please click here to learn more.
- On Thursday I’m co-hosting a free webinar with Rushton Hurley. It’s called Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff. Join us!
- Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know is available on-demand as is A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video.