ADA Compliancy
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute designed to ensure equal access to opportunities and benefits for qualified individuals with disabilities. The act seeks to remove barriers preventing qualified people with disabilities from enjoying the same opportunities enjoyed by those without disabilities.
Captions allow persons with hearing disabilities to have access to videos by displaying the audio portion of the video as text on the screen.
In many state, government, or education institutions, videos must include ADA compliant captions. Camtasia Studio helps you adhere to these standards by providing an ADA compliant captioning feature.
ADA compliant captions:
- Are one to three lines of text that appear on-screen all at once, stay there for a few seconds, and are replaced by another caption or no caption
- Are timed to synchronize with the audio
- Should not cover up graphics and other essential visual elements of the picture
- Require the use of upper and lowercase letters
- Must use a font similar to Helvetica medium
- Must have good resolution
- Fit the requested 32 characters to a line
See this Wikipedia article for more information.
Camtasia Studio and ADA Compliant Captions
- By default, new captions are added using ADA compliant font settings. When the ADA Compliant button is blue, ADA Compliancy mode is on
. - If a font attribute is selected that is not ADA compliant, the ADA Compliant button grays out and a tip alerts you that you are out of compliancy.
Restore ADA Compliancy
To restore ADA compliancy to the captions, click the ADA compliant button.
This is a global setting. All captions return to ADA compliancy and all other formatting is removed.
Tips for Creating Effective Captions
- Captions should be synchronized and appear at approximately the same time as the audio.
- Words should be verbatim when time allows or as close as possible in other situations.
- Descriptions for music or other sound effects should be inside square brackets, such as [music] or [laughter].
- Captions should appear on-screen long enough to be read.
- Captions should be limited to no more than two lines on-screen.
- Speakers should be identified when more than one person is on-screen or when the speaker is not visible.
- Punctuation is used to clarify meaning.
- Spelling should be correct throughout the production.
- Sound effects should be written when they add to understanding.
- All words should be captioned, regardless of language or dialect.
- Italics should be used when a new word is being defined or a word is heavily emphasized in speech.