Captioning service platforms available to support academic accessibility

Captioning makes audio and video content more accessible. As SUNY Oswego has shifted to alternative modes of teaching in recent weeks, more students than ever stand to benefit from the captioning of video content. To support faculty in the first weeks of their transition to online teaching, CTS offered captioning services for some newly generated videos.

The campus is now moving to a self-service model for captioning. This means that faculty are responsible for captioning their own teaching-related video content. Some free services include:

• YouTube has free machine-generated captions and online captioning editing.

• Otter.ai has a free account option with 600 minutes per month.

• Ensemble has machine-generated captioning and an online editor.

• Zoom has a free transcription service that generates a transcript after a cloud recorded Zoom session is uploaded. 

• Google Meet has free live captioning services.

• Google Slides has a free live caption service when presenting.

There are many benefits of captioning audio and video content:

• Providing captioning and transcripts fulfills a legal requirement (Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, section 508) for students with disabilities, even if they haven’t requested accommodations. It’s not just required by law, it’s the right thing to do. 

• Transcripts can be helpful when people have difficulty focusing on audio because of other distractions in their current home environment (children, family members, pets, etc).

• Providing the text as an alternate means of study can assist and reinforce the lecture. 

• Knowing that students have a variety of bandwidth capabilities, it is good to provide low tech solutions including the transcript of the video. This aids students who have difficulty streaming videos because of network or economic limitations.

We encourage all instructors to utilize these resources to caption or transcribe the video that they create for their courses. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact the Help Desk at help@oswego.edu.