Captioning and Transcription for Legal Content
Updated: July 17, 2019
When we refer to legal video content, we may be referring to several different types of content. For example, law schools often use videos as a learning supplement, and law firms may use videos for branding and marketing purposes.
The benefits of captioning and transcribing legal content are many. For starters, captions and transcripts enhance legal content when used in educational environments and encourage students’ success in the classroom. In a marketing context, accessible videos boost brand awareness, improve SEO, and help drive site traffic.
Several things are important to consider when captioning and transcribing legal content. In this post, we’ll address the common challenges organizations face when making legal content accessible. You’ll also discover which features to look for in a third-party vendor when searching for video accessibility solutions.
What’s Important When Captioning Legal Content?
Quality and Clarity
Accuracy is vital when captioning legal content. Think about it–with all the legal jargon, accurate captions help to relieve much uncertainty with legal jargon when watching legal content. For instance, in an educational environment, it’s critical to caption and transcribe videos accurately. After all, captions improve focus and comprehension, and students rely on the quality and clarity of captions to help aid them in their studies.
On the other hand, law offices using videos for marketing purposes will find that accuracy goes a long way for boosting SEO and driving more website traffic. Search engines look at caption and transcript files to help rank videos, so it’s best to minimize errors.
Legal Compliance
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all sites of public accommodation provide effective communication access for people with disabilities. Places of public accommodation include law offices and educational institutions (public and private). Providing captioned videos is one way to comply with this mandate.
Title III doesn’t only apply to physical spaces. Recent rulings in web accessibility litigation show that websites are considered places of public accommodation in some instances, and therefore, must be accessible on all fronts. A law firm sharing informational content on their site must also caption their videos.
Sections 508 and 504 from the Rehabilitation Act also requires that institutions receiving federal funding, as many educational institutions do, provide accommodations for equal access to video content.
What Are Common Challenges When Captioning Legal Content?
Transcribing Legal Jargon
Those who are getting legal content captioned have the challenge of finding a vendor that can accurately transcribe legal terminology.
The legal field and the language that goes along with it can be complicated, ask any lawyer. Naturally, legal content is going to be jam-packed with this complicated language, and likely, the average person may not be familiar with the terminology. Luckily, captions and transcripts help to clarify technical jargon when they’re accurate.
Captioning Workflow
Finding the right captioning workflow can be difficult, especially when dealing with varying timelines, volumes, and overall captioning needs across different organizations. A law school may find that they need a vendor which works seamlessly with their current learning management system but care less about turnaround time. On the other hand, a law office may require faster turnaround speeds for their caption files to keep legal content on their website up to date.
Every organization has unique requirements. The difficulty lies in finding a vendor that not only understands this fact but that can address each of those needs.
Features to Look for In a Captioning and Transcription Vendor
Important Vendor Features
- Accessibility
- Accuracy
- Integrations
- Turnaround
- Topic Expertise
- Term Glossary
Accessibility Compliance
It’s essential that a captioning vendor prioritizes caption accuracy, video accessibility, and legal compliance. 3Play Media serves as an accessibility partner to organizations across the U.S. We also ensure that our captions are ADA, Section 508 and 504, and WCAG 2.0 compliant.
Accuracy Guarantee
To be sure that a vendor is going to provide a high-quality service, ask about the captioning process. Things like 99 percent caption accuracy don’t just happen; there’s usually a reliable and tested process behind that product. At 3Play, our process combines technology and human review. Every file undergoes a stringent, multi-step quality assurance process, which includes two rounds of human review.
Integrations
Choosing a vendor that is compatible with the video platform on which your organization hosts videos makes the captioning process seamless and easy. 3Play offers more than 20 video platform integrations, including YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove, and Wistia.
Multiple Turnaround Options
Seeking a vendor that offers multiple turnaround options ensures that you can select the best choice for your organization’s needs. At 3Play Media, our standard turnaround is four business days. We also offer two-business-day, one-business-day, eight-hour, and two-hour turnaround. Our staff of thousands of transcriptionists is capable of processing large volumes of content very quickly
Topic-specific Expertise
What about all of the legal jargon? Finding a vendor that can handle complex terminology is a good rule of thumb for captioning legal content. 3Play has a staff of thousands of transcriptionists. This gives us the flexibility to assign complex or technical content to transcriptionists with discipline-specific expertise.
Technical Glossary
In case you want to be extra cautious about the accuracy of caption files, we’ve got you covered. In your 3Play account, you can create a technical glossary where keywords, a technical vocabulary, and special instructions can be preloaded on a file-by-file basis or applied to an entire folder or project.
This blog post is written for educational and general information purposes only and does not constitute specific legal advice. This blog should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state.
