Transcripts

Hello and welcome to module five of our accessibility training. This video will focus on transcripts.
Videos should include both captions and transcripts. Luckily, once you have one of these elements, the other is very easy to get. We explored how making captions from a transcript is easy using YouTube, but the process also works well in the other direction.

To get a transcript from any YouTube video, first open the video on YouTube. Click these three horizontal dots on the right of the bar under the video, and select “Show Transcript” from the dropdown. The transcript will then appear to the right of the video. To remove the timestamps, click these three vertical dots and select “Toggle Timestamps”. Now, just copy-paste the text wherever you will be displaying your transcript.

Now that you have your transcript, you’ll need a good place to display it for the viewer. There are a couple options for where to include your transcript. We’ll cover three of them, two of which are specific to websites using the Carleton template. The options are:

• Slide Me’s for CMS
• Accordions for CuTheme
• Or a linked file, which can be used on any website.

The Slide-Me may be familiar to you, as it’s what we use in this training to display our transcripts. Its basic function is as a dropdown that can be expanded and collapsed to show or hide content. This feature is only available in CMS, though CuTheme includes a similar tool. A full tutorial on creating Slide-Me’s is available on our CMS Help Centre, and this page is linked to in the Slide Me Tutorial button in the module section above this video.

Next, we have the CuTheme equivalent, the Accordion. Again, to get a full tutorial on creating this element, click the Accordion Tutorial button in this page’s module to be redirected to our CuTheme training. Accordions are a little visually different to Slide-Me’s, but they function in the same way: expanding and collapsing with a click. They’re also not built within the page itself, but included using a listings block. Please see the Accordion tutorial for more information.

Another option for including a transcript is to provide a linked file. This file should be in plain-text, and be able to be opened without being downloaded. The recommended file type is .txt, which can be created using Word, Google Docs, or other word processing programs.

To create a linked file on CMS or CuTheme websites, start by uploading the file to the Media Library. Click “Add New” and select your file. Then click the file in the Media Library and copy the link to its attachment page in the “Copy Link” field. From there, you can enter this link like any other. Be sure to write some descriptive anchor text and save the page you’ve added it to.

Whether you choose to include your transcript in an accordion, slide-me, or as a linked file, having a transcript alongside your video is an easy but important step towards making your video content more accessible.