Subtitling vs interpretation
There are important distinctions between general support and targeted pedagogical support. The department is responsible for general support and accessibility, while targeted pedagogical support is often co-funded by national resources. Interpretation is classified as targeted pedagogical support, whereas subtitling is general support.
Interpreting pre-recorded material
Interpreting services often receive requests to interpret pre-recorded lectures instead of subtitling them. Subtitling benefits a wider range of students, not just those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and therefore cannot be considered as targeted pedagogical support. There is an exception where interpretation of pre-recorded teaching material may be possible. A student studying with a sign language interpreter may need to have recorded teaching materials interpreted into Swedish Sign Language instead of reading the subtitles. The reasoning behind this exception is that deaf students should have the same prerequisites for learning as hearing students. Hearing students read course literature and listen to recorded lectures and sign language students read course literature and should be allowed to "listen" to lectures, in this case in Swedish Sign Language. In these cases, subtitling can therefore be supplemented with sign language interpretation to provide an equivalent prerequisite.
It is important to request sign language interpretation well in advance, so that it can be interpreted before the material is made available to the students. A sign language interpreter may refrain from accepting an open publishing of the interpretation with reference to the GDPR.
Laws and regulations for accessibility
The ‘Accessibility to Digital Public Services Act’ (abbreviation in Swedish: DOS) applies to all the country's universities. However, it has been unclear which videos on a university’s website need to be subtitled. Several universities have concluded that only videos on public pages need to be subtitled, while teaching material on closed course pages is not subject to the requirement. If a deaf or hard-of-hearing student is enrolled in a course with pre-recorded material, the DOS Law does not apply, but the ‘Discrimination Act’ does. This law requires the teacher to make the teaching materials accessible.
Examples of material requiring subtitling
Materials that you as a teacher need to check for subtitling includes:
- Self-produced videos
- Pre-recorded lectures
- Live-recorded lessons published after recording
- Videos and clips from the internet, such as YouTube
- Videos from media companies (e.g., SVT)
If a video cannot be subtitled due to copyright reasons, alternative methods of accessibility should be provided. A transcript with time codes could be an alternative, where the time codes allow viewers to see where the transcript aligns with the video. Auto-generated subtitles may seem like an easy solution but often have flaws. If the lecture is in English, it may work reasonably well, but the quality decreases significantly if the lecture is in Swedish, especially if it contains many technical terms. Post-editing to correct errors is necessary to ensure the quality is sufficient.