Since many teachers may be technologically inexperienced, automated captions allow for these teachers to provide captions with their video. However, automated captions may lack punctuation and not emphasize certain words that the teacher wants students to remember. Additionally, many speakers often use body language, which is not transcribed by the automated captions.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Usage of Automated Captioning in Education

Under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, organizers of remote informational or educational events are required to provide access to audio for Deaf and hard of hearing individuals by ensuring that audio is visible. 

Required Access to Audio for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Individuals


During the COVID-19 Pandemic, most American schools moved to an entirely virtual course model via the usage of video lectures. To comply with federal regulations for federally funded institutions, all lectures would need to be captioned. Since it would be too time and cost intensive to manually create captions for each lecture, automated captions are often used instead.

Grinnell College

A program has automated captioning, or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), if the text is generated by a speech recognition or translation program instead of a person. This is often used on social media websites, such as YouTube and Facebook, due to the vast amount of visual content on these websites. 

Automated Captioning

Rogers. (2020). Snapshot—Using the YouTube Automated Captioning Tool for Video Lectures. In Universal Access Through Inclusive Instructional Design (1st ed., pp. 221–223). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429435515-28

Using the YouTube Automated Captioning Tool for Video Lectures

Since this type of captioning relies on technology that may struggle with accents and vocal inflections, automated captioning can often be poor, nonsensical, and unreliable. These captions also often leave out important non-verbal sounds, meaning that content may not be fully captioned. 

Problems with Automated Captioning

Usage of Automated Captioning in Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Through the use of artificial intelligence, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is designed to capture every sound spoken, and will display a word for each utterance without regards to its accuracy or whether it makes sense in context. In order to do this, ASR makes a “best guess” for words and phrases. 


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