As mentioned in my March 11 memo, if you choose to post video and audio materials for your online class, including external materials, they must meet ADA closed-captioning requirements. We have now looked at the currently available tools and found that the Microsoft Stream tool is the easily applied. Using Zoom or YouTube to add transcripts or captions is possible, but they have various usability issues that make them far less convenient.
Following a subsequent request from CLAS, the UF Information Security office has now approved Microsoft Stream for general use in e-learning resources. We appreciate the fast action by UFIT, and have produced a step-by-step guide to using Stream (ATTACHED) with the kind assistance of Jennifer Scott (Psychology). This guide shows how to add automatic closed captions to MP4 videos using Stream. After creation of the captions for the video, the video can be viewed by your students using a link generated by Stream (usually you would add the link to your course resources in Canvas). Note that the MP4 video itself will not have the captions embedded, so it will need to be played using the link.
MP4 videos can be produced using Zoom. Here are the relevant instructional links:
- Scheduling and starting a Zoom meeting
- Recording a Zoom meeting **SEE NOTE BELOW
** These instructions are based on saving the recorded video to the CLOUD so a transcript can be produced by Zoom for accessibility. While this does work, it is a very slow and cumbersome process and closed captions are not produced. In contrast, Stream is much faster and easier to use and produces closed captions as the video is played. We strongly recommend using the Local recording option (record to computer)  in Zoom, which saves the MP4 file on your local computer after recording. The resulting file can then be captioned quickly by following the attached instructions for Stream.
I hope you find this guide useful.
