Faculty preparing for spring classes? You need captions

Compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a priority of Metropolitan
Community College. In order to better prepare our students, the ADA department at MCC created a captioning department to help make classroom (on and off line) materials available for all students.

The closed captioning department was created to keep up with the growing demand of online courses offered. Additionally, it was a cost saving measure. Sending instructional videos out to be closed captioned was very expensive. Outside vendors charge $6 per minute, which is $360 for every hour video.

The closed captioning magic is all done by Michele Clapp. “Most of the material we do is for online classes,” said Clapp. “However, it is important for traditional class media to be captioned as well. A lot of people believe that if you have an interpreter in class, that is compliant. But if you are showing videos in your class, a student has to look away from media or television in order to watch the interpreter, so they can’t see what’s happening in the video. They miss a lot of information.”

“For material to be prepared ahead of time, a deaf student has to identify themselves in order for anything to be done. It’s nice for them to not to have to do that. To just be another student in the class,” added Clapp. That is why it is so important to have not only the online material captioned, but also in class media as well.


Distance education now requires all videos to be captioned before being loaded to Blackboard.

For more information about captioning, the process and FAQs, visit these two links:
http://mcckcdes.pbworks.com/w/page/Distance-Education-Services-Wiki
http://mcckcdes.pbworks.com/w/page/Captioning