Closed Captioning at Mary Livermore Library

As part of UNC Pembroke’s commitment to provide reasonable accommodations to students with documented disabilities, the University has adopted a policy requiring “any and all audiovisual media used during, with, or in support of classes, including supplemental instruction” to be made accessible to every student in the course with a documented hearing disability through the use of closed captioning. This includes library course reserve materials.

“Closed captioning” is the display of visible text for spoken audio, most often seen on the bottom of the screen and sometimes used interchangeably with the term “subtitles.” The symbol indicates a program is closed captioned, as does the indication of subtitles in a DVD menu.

The following are some of current resources for closed captioned material:

• Mary Livermore Library – The library catalog subject heading “Films for the hearing impaired” identifies all closed captioned materials in the Mary Livermore Library media collection. As of December 2008, we have 2,384 captioned media items. Materials not owned by the Library may be requested for purchase and/or requested via Document Delivery.

• The NC LIVE online resource collection contains PBS videos that have close captioning and provides a list of just those items with closed captioning: http://media.nclive.org/browse_videos.phtml?CConly=1

• Currently all major networks are required by law to transmit closed captioned programming during the prime time hours of 8 pm – 11pm. Some of these programs are commercially available.

• All feature film DVDs, most non-feature film DVDs, and many videos in both categories come with captioning.

• Films for the Sciences and the Humanities (http://ffh.films.com/) allows you to select an “advanced search” option to search by title, keyword, or subject, limiting the search to videos or DVDs with captioning.

• Amazon.com will indicate if a DVD or video is captioned or subtitled. Scroll down the page to the “Product Details” section and look for “Format.”

• The Library Video Company (http://www.libraryvideo.com/) offers all of their programs produced after 1992 with captioning.

• Information for the captioning of digital documents can be obtained from the National Center for Accessible Media (http://ncam.wgbh.org/), Microsoft Help sites for adding captioning to PC documents (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384923.aspx and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms971317.aspx), Hi-Caption (https://www.cryptzone.com/), and the Captioned Media Program (http://www.cfv.org/default.aspx) or by using the Microsoft Syncronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) technology, which requires some knowledge of HTML web authoring.

• As a last resort, non-captioned materials can be captioned by a commercial vendor. However, can be expensive and currently must come from the department’s budget, often through a requisition. Disability Support Services and the Media Center do not provide captioning services at this time. More than 100 agencies provide captioning services.

Any questions regarding obtaining closed captioning resources can be obtained by contacting the Reference Desk at 910.521.6656 or refdesk@uncp.edu or liaison for the Accessibility Resource Center (ARC), June Power – Director of Special Collections and Archives, at 910.521.6369 or june.power@uncp.edu. Further information can be obtained from UNCP’s Accessibility Resource Center (ARC) at 910.521.6891, 711/NC Relay, or arc@uncp.edu.