The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Rehabilitation Act, and the Department of Justice guidelines require both public entities and places of public accommodation (including colleges and universities) to make an equivalent alternative to video available for anyone with a disability. In most cases, captioning is the only legally adequate alternative. At the CTE, we also encourage instructors to design the learning environment that is accessible to the widest possible audience, including providing captioned materials in the courses. All students can benefit from having alternative means of accessing/processing information found in a video.
Use An Existing Accessible Video
The following external resources provide closed captioning with video:
You can also search for closed captioned videos through Google’s Advanced Search or Youtube Filters.
Creating An Accessible Video
In circumstances where faculty might need to provide their own captions, the CTE can assist with recommending best practices and free tools to develop video captions. For example:
- Youtube has a straightforward captioning tool that faculty can use to create their own captions or edit YouTube’s automatic captions in order to meet the 99% accuracy standard. Please note, however, that YouTube’s automatic captions are not reliably accurate and typically do not meet the legal standard.
- Panopto allows users to upload captions to videos.