Standards for media

The UM standards for captioned media and guidelines are listed below. 

The basic UM standards for media include:

• closed captioning: synchronized humanly perfected verbatim transcripts (not captions provide directly from voice recognition processes)
• audio descriptions

The DCMP captions guidelines offer basic requirements such as:

• Contain two lines of text, with around 32 characters per line of sans serif font.
• Show no less than 2 seconds and aim at a rate of about 120-130 words per minute presentation rate.
• Identify speaker names or identifiers followed by a colon and the dialogue - John: What do you mean?
• Indicate meaningful silences - Mother: Where have you been? Son: (silence)
• Indicate sounds in brackets - [horns honking], [wind whistling], [music], [awkward silence], [people shouting over each other]
• Indicate unknown sounds or words with several question marks - John: I'm going to the ???
• Use bold, italic or underline features - "That was REALLY cool!", "WHAT?"
• Use brackets to indicate timid or whispered words - Girl [whispers] I'm scared
• Use "..." when the dialogue is muffled or too low to discern - "I didn’t mean to hurt him, I …………… I was defending myself."
• Accurately transcribe language so viewers understand language register - "I told Johnny I was gonna get him for beatin' me in the race today.  Cuz I was mad. I wanted to win…"