Submission Rejection

Closed Captioning with CaptionSync can be affected by the quality of the audio content. This article describes the options available when a submission is rejected.
Note: if your submission was rejected because the audio consists mainly of non-spoken content, or onscreen text or subtitles, please read our Captioning Non-Spoken or Visual Content, or Onscreen Text article for more information.

When CaptionSync receives a submission for transcription, it is automatically assigned to an appropriate transcriber. We use only trained, professional transcribers, and they are generally able to handle a wide variety of subject matter and audio quality. AST carefully monitors transcription quality from all of our transcribers, so if our transcriber feels that the recording quality is such that they cannot maintain our expected quality standards for your submission, then they will reject it. A rejected submission is routed to our staff for review – if our reviewer feels that another transcriber may be able to tackle your submission, it will be reassigned to another transcriber. You will typically receive an automated notice if your submission is reassigned. If the submission gets rejected by too many transcribers, then a Difficult Audio option will be presented to you. We have a pool of transcribers who are capable of transcribing more difficult recordings, but this takes considerably more time and cost. If you approve the additional costs of routing the submission to this specialty pool, we will re-attempt to get the content transcribed. If you don't approve, the submission will stay as rejected and you will not be billed for any services.

If you want our transcriber to just provide a best-effort to get a transcript without setting the quality standard as high as we typically ask, then you can indicate this in the Guidance to Transcriber section. This does not guarantee that they will complete the submission, but it will increase the likelihood that they will attempt it if the audio quality is poor.

Even if we can successfully get a transcript, poor quality audio can result in additional problems during the generation of the caption files. It can result in bad timing in the caption files, or in a failure to generate a caption file at all. If we transcribe your submission and it fails to caption, it will be routed to our review staff for repair. AST does not charge extra to repair occasional captioning failures due to poor audio, however if you have a lot of content with poor audio quality, or you repeatedly submit poor quality audio files, we ask that you use our Result Review service to have your submissions automatically routed to an AST reviewer to manually check and correct your results (an extra fee applies for Result Review).

Please note that Result Review is only available for Captioning-Only and Transcription/Captioning requests.

If your submissions are being rejected, you may want to explore improving your mic'ing and recording equipment – after all, if our transcribers are unable to understand your material, it is likely that your viewers are also not getting the full value of your recordings. Some tips:

• Improve recording conditions by using lapel mics to try to eliminate extraneous noise, or changing the location where the recording takes place.

• Clean up the audio to remove background and extraneous noise, before submitting it to us.

More information about improving the quality of your audio content is provided in our Improving Audio Quality article.