Creating accessible media content generally means adding transcription and/or captions to video content. Oregon State University Ecampus conducted a study on transcripts and captions (in collaboration with 3PlayMedia) that demonstrated these features were used by a majority of students to improve comprehension of materials. Ensuring that your media is captioned is one of the most important steps you can take to improve the quality and accessibility of your media content.

The National Association of the Deaf website provides an excellent summary of why captions are an important aspect of media content. It is also important to note that there are differences between transcripts and captions, and it’s beneficial to provide both.

Kaltura – OSU's Media Platform

Kaltura is the official university platform for storing, managing and sharing video content. While instructions for adding captions to videos provided here will be specific to Kaltura, most video platforms (e.g., YouTube) have similar tools to provide media captions.

Create and Edit Captions in Kaltura

Creating captions from scratch is technically challenging and requires a user to know a very specific text structure and be able to save the file in a specific format. Fortunately, Kaltura makes it relatively simple to add captions to your media content.

The process to add captions to videos in Kaltura is outlined here:

  1. Request machine captions
  2. Edit the machine captions to improve accuracy
  3. Modify the captions label
  4. Publish captions

It is also possible to upload captions to a Kaltura video, or edit, delete or download captions from a Kaltura video.

Zoom Live Transcriptions

Consider enabling Live Transcriptions in your Zoom meetings. The Live Transcription feature in Zoom allows Zoom participants to view auto-transcriptions or closed captions. If you have a DAS student who requires closed captions during lecture, DAS will provide assistance setting up the closed caption settings and also provide professional transcription services for course meetings. If the meeting will be recorded, you can configure Zoom to send the audio transcription to Kaltura along with the Zoom recording. This audio transcription will appear in Kaltura and can be edited and published to provide captioning on the recorded video.

Taking Captions to the Next Level

If you have a student who has registered with Disability Access Services (DAS), the DAS team will provide professional captioning for the media content in your course. This ensures that the accuracy and quality of the captions meet legal requirements.

If you are interested in learning more about the factors required for quality captioning, the Described and Captioned Media Program provides excellent educational resources through their Captioning Key documentation including the following topics: