The San Diego Air & Space Museum is constantly making sure it is employing best practices in relation to the experience of our visitors. One area we recently started to improve was making sure our videos playing around the Museum floor are closed captioned to aid our hearing-impaired visitors.

Most of the videos shown on our floor are custom or don’t have available captioning. Rachel Johnston, the Museum’s video specialist, has taken the digital files of the videos and run them through specialized software, giving a rough captioning of each video. She then went line-by-line in the video’s caption file and to make sure the words and sounds were transcribed correctly. Finally, the captioning is “burned” into the video footage and is always displayed, no matter the operating system playing the video.

Depending on the length of the video, this process can take quite a bit of time. Currently, the Museum still has a few videos left in need of captioning, but we should have the project complete before the end of the calendar year.