Per ADA requirements, any audio/video media used for teaching purposes must be accessible. This means that accurate closed captions, transcripts, or summaries must be provided for all video and audio content.
Choose Content that is Already Captioned
The easiest way to ensure that your media is accessible is to use audio/video content from services that provide accurate closed captions and transcripts. We have generated a list of services that offer closed captioned videos on our Finding Educational Videos page. We encourage you to explore your options on that page and to always select media from services that offer accurate closed captions and/or transcripts.
Captioning Content You Recorded
All faculty have access to Kaltura, a media management and recording tool. Kaltura can be used to record/upload videos, narrated screen-recordings (lectures), and audio. Closed Captions are automatically generated for audio/video in Kaltura, but they are not perfect. In order for this content to be considered accessible, you should review and update Kaltura’s automatically generated closed captions.
Zoom
Learn how to enable recording and auto transcribe zoom meetings. You should review and update auto transcriptions for accuracy.
YouTube also automatically generates closed captions for videos. If you have uploaded videos to YouTube that are used for teaching, you should review and update YouTube’s automatically generated captions to ensure they are accurate.
If you share YouTube videos with your students that you did not upload, you can check to see if the video has accurate closed captions by clicking the gear icon on the YouTube player toolbar and looking for an “English” option under Subtitles/CC. If there is an “English” option, that means the closed captions are verified as accurate. If you only see “English (auto-generated)” we recommend looking for a different video or pulling the videos into Kaltura so that you can edit the closed captions.
To caption videos that you did not record yourself, we recommend Amara, a free, do-it-yourself caption editor. You can learn more about how to caption videos in Amara here.