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Lecture Caption and Transcript Template

Four documents and four sheets, built around a correction list scoped to the course rather than to each separate recording.

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Pack of 8 files: 4 documents, 4 spreadsheets

Lecture Caption and Transcript Template

Caption Style GuideDocument
Caption Format ReferenceDocument
Terminology Correction ListSpreadsheet
Correction ProcedureDocument
Correction FindingsDocument
Media RegisterSpreadsheet
Caption Review LogSpreadsheet
Accessibility Compliance CheckSpreadsheet

Lecture Caption and Transcript Template

Terminology Correction List

[Course code] — the terms this course keeps losing

One row per term, built for the course rather than for a recording, applied to every recording in it.

Term	Machine output	Resolution	Pair partner	Context test	First seen
—	—	required	—	—	—
—	—	required	—	—	—
—	—	required	—	—	—
—	—	required	—	—	—
—	—	required	—	—	—
—	—	required	—	—	—

Term

Machine output

Resolution

Pair partner

Context test

First seen

—

required

—

required

—

required

—

required

—

required

—

required

—

Resolution is the one cell here that is never left blank. Substitution means the misheard form is not a word this course uses, so the row applies without reading around it. Context required means it is, the partner column names the other word, and the test replaces the substitution.

Every guide to captioning a lecture recording closes on the same line. Generate the automatic track, then review it carefully, paying particular attention to technical terms and proper nouns. The line is correct. It is also the entire job, restated as a reminder, and it carries no mechanism, so it gets done from memory once per recording. The vocabulary a course keeps losing is rediscovered every week by whoever happens to be doing that week's pass.

This pack scopes the correction list to the course rather than to the file. The worked audit in it covers BIOL 2140 Human Physiology at Brackenridge College: 24 recordings, 1,412 minutes, 1,043 logged corrections. 604 of those were course terminology, and they came from 37 distinct terms that were present in a recording 312 times. So 275 of the 312 encounters were a term somebody teaching that course had already decided how to spell.

Fourteen of the 37 terms are half of a bidirectional pair, where the form the recogniser produced is itself course vocabulary: homeostasis and hemostasis, afferent and efferent, neuron and nephron. Those 14 carry 256 corrections, and 17 recordings hold both members of a pair, so every row states a resolution class and pair rows carry a context test instead of a substitution. Terms come first in every pass, which is also why the rebuild of an inherited course starts from the same list.

The 37 terms, the 24 passes that kept meeting them, and what still fails at the end

The Terminology Correction List, the Caption Review Log, and the Accessibility Compliance Check.

Lecture Caption and Transcript Template

Terminology Correction ListCaption Review LogAccessibility Compliance Check

Terminology Correction List

Seven of the 37 rows kept for BIOL 2140 Human Physiology at Brackenridge College. Corrections and recordings are counted across the whole course.

Term	Machine output	Resolution	Pair partner	Corr.	Recs	Context test
homeostasis	hemostasis	Context required	hemostasis	38	17	Clotting cues name platelets, fibrin or a vessel wall
depolarisation	repolarisation	Context required	repolarisation	31	16	Toward threshold is depolarisation, back toward rest is repolarisation
acetylcholine	a settle coleen	Substitution	n/a	31	13	n/a
hemostasis	homeostasis	Context required	homeostasis	28	12	Regulation of the internal environment is the other one
perfusion	profusion	Substitution	n/a	26	15	n/a
neuron	nephron	Context required	nephron	26	14	A filtrate, a tubule or a loop in the sentence means nephron
ileum	ilium	Context required	ilium	4	3	Absorption means ileum, the pelvis means ilium

Term

Machine output

Resolution

Pair partner

Corr.

Recs

Context test

homeostasis

hemostasis

Context required

hemostasis

Clotting cues name platelets, fibrin or a vessel wall

depolarisation

repolarisation

Context required

repolarisation

Toward threshold is depolarisation, back toward rest is repolarisation

acetylcholine

a settle coleen

Substitution

n/a

hemostasis

homeostasis

Context required

homeostasis

Regulation of the internal environment is the other one

perfusion

profusion

Substitution

n/a

neuron

nephron

Context required

nephron

A filtrate, a tubule or a loop in the sentence means nephron

ileum

ilium

Context required

ilium

Absorption means ileum, the pelvis means ilium

Rows one and four are the same confusion in both directions, 66 corrections between them, and both words are terms in this course. A find and replace on either one corrupts the other wherever it was already right, which is what the context test is for.

Caption Review Log

Eight of the 24 passes. Every correction is filed under one of four categories, so the repeating work separates from the work that is new each time.

Rec	Min	Terms	Distinct	New	Both	Timing	Num.	Spkr	Total	Review	×run
L01	90	24	9	9	Yes	8	9	2	43	88	0.98
L02	52	6	5	0	Yes	16	2	4	28	54	1.04
L04	50	14	6	0	No	7	13	3	37	62	1.24
L08	51	17	10	4	No	22	6	5	50	76	1.49
L15	45	21	13	0	No	6	4	1	32	54	1.20
L17	48	35	16	1	No	6	5	1	47	71	1.48
L23	46	47	22	0	Yes	12	4	4	67	90	1.96
L24	44	29	17	0	Yes	4	9	3	45	67	1.52

L23 is the shape of the problem: 47 terminology corrections from 22 distinct terms, none of them new, in a 46 minute recording that took 90 minutes to review. Every decision in that pass had already been made earlier in the same course. Both flags a recording that uses both halves of a pair, which is where no substitution is safe.

Accessibility Compliance Check

One row per criterion. Scope is stated per row, because the counts differ: 24 recordings, 30 caption file deliveries, 9 recordings whose slides carry the figures.

ID	Criterion	Level	Scope	Passing	Failing	State
CC-01	WCAG 2.1 SC 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded)	A	24	24	0	Passes
CC-02	Non-speech audio information in the track	A	24	24	0	Passes
CC-03	Speaker identification in the track	A	24	24	0	Passes
CC-04	WCAG 2.1 SC 1.2.1 Audio-only (Prerecorded)	A	2	2	0	Passes
CC-05	WCAG 2.1 SC 1.2.4 Captions (Live)	AA	2	0	2	Fails
CC-06	WCAG 2.1 SC 1.2.5 Audio Description	AA	9	0	9	Fails
CC-07	Caption file encoding	n/a	30	30	0	Passes
CC-08	Format accepted by the destination	n/a	30	30	0	Passes
CC-09	Cue reading rate within the style guide	n/a	24	21	3	Fails
CC-10	Terminology checked against the list	n/a	24	24	0	Passes

Three rows fail and only one of them is a captioning problem. CC-05 is two streamed sessions nobody booked a live service for, CC-06 is nine recordings whose figures were pointed at rather than read out, and CC-09 is three recordings running past 180 words a minute.

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What you get

Terminology Correction List

One row per term the recogniser gets wrong, with the form it produced, a resolution class, and the recordings it has appeared in. This is the artifact that outlives the course, and the reason the next term costs less than this one.

Caption Review Log

One row per correction pass, splitting what it found into course terminology, cue timing, numbers and units, and speaker labels. The split is what shows which part of the work repeats and which part is genuinely new each week.

Media Register

One row per recording: runtime, capture source, transcript word count, measured speech rate, the format published to each destination, and whether the slides carry content the audio never says.

Accessibility Compliance Check

One row per criterion, each with its own stated scope, because 24 recordings and 30 caption file deliveries are different denominators. Rows for SC 1.2.2, 1.2.4 and 1.2.5 sit next to encoding and destination-format checks, in a form an accreditation self-study can cite directly.

Caption Style Guide

Line length, cue duration, how student questions are attributed, how numbers and units are written, and the reading-rate ceiling. Settled once for the course so two reviewers produce the same file.

Caption Format Reference

What WebVTT and SubRip each actually require, written from the specifications rather than from a converter's help page, plus what survives a conversion between them and what does not.

Correction Procedure

The five passes in fixed order, terms first and timing last, because correcting terms moves where cues want to break and doing timing first means doing it twice.

Correction Findings

The full worked audit the sheets arrive shaped by, including the quarter-by-quarter split where terminology corrections more than double while new terms fall from 14 to 5.

How it works

1
Send the course, not just a file
The reading list, the slide decks, the glossary, a past exam paper, the syllabus. A course publishes its own vocabulary weeks before it says any of it out loud, so half the correction list is writable before anybody opens an audio file.
2
Send a machine transcript
The raw automatic output from one recording or several, uncleaned. River reads it against the vocabulary, proposes correction-list rows, and marks every row where the misheard form is itself a term the course uses.
3
Run a pass per recording
Terms, numbers, speaker labels, sense, then timing. Each pass fills a Caption Review Log row by category, so by the fourth recording the log is already saying which category is repeating.
4
Publish and check the course
One corrected cue list generates a file per destination, so a later move to another platform carries the corrections with it, and the compliance check states per criterion what is in scope and what is passing.

Frequently asked questions

What format are the downloaded files?

The four documents come as .docx and the four sheets as .csv, so they open in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets with no conversion step. The download needs no account. Caption files themselves are a separate output, covered by the Caption Format Reference.

What does Edit with AI actually do?

It installs this pack as a private space and primes River to fill it from what you send. In practice the first useful output is a draft correction list built from your reading list and slide decks, before a single recording has been reviewed.

Are automatic captions enough for accessibility?

Word accuracy is a different measure from conformance. WCAG 2.1 defines captions as a synchronized alternative for both speech and non-speech audio information, including speaker identification, and a speech recogniser produces neither, so those two start at zero in every recording however clean the transcript reads.

Should I publish WebVTT or SubRip?

Whatever the destination parses, and keep one corrected cue list that generates both. A WebVTT file begins with the literal string WEBVTT, is encoded UTF-8, and takes a full stop before the milliseconds; a SubRip entry needs a sequence number, a comma, and a blank line closing it.

Does this work for a course that is not physiology?

The worked example is physiology because the confusable pairs are vivid there, but the mechanism is subject-neutral. Any field with dense vocabulary produces the same shape: a small set of terms carrying most of the corrections, and a subset whose misheard form is also a real term the course design already names.

How fast is too fast to caption verbatim?

Section 508 guidance puts the practical ceiling at 180 words per minute, about three words a second, past which a captioner has to choose between cues that vanish before they can be read and cues that drift out of sync. The Media Register measures the rate per recording.

Does this cover live sessions?

Not directly, and the compliance check says so rather than hiding it. Live captioning is a service somebody books before the session starts, so it appears as its own row with an owner outside this space, next to the recorded rows it keeps getting confused with.

Sources

Written by

Chandler Supple

Co-founder & CEO, River

Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.

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Reviewed by

Brian Joseff, Co-founder, River

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Find the terms your course keeps losing

Send a machine transcript, or just the reading list and the slide decks. River drafts the correction list first, then runs the passes against it.

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Lecture Caption and Transcript Template

[Course code] — the terms this course keeps losing