Tools for Captions

Websites

There are free websites that have tools for manually captioning videos. Some of them are video hosting websites, such as YouTube.com, and others are specifically geared towards transcribing and captioning, such as Amara.org.

There are premium captioning websites available as well; however, it might be easier to use a website that your institution already pays to use. An institution might already pay to use a video hosting platform (e.g. Kaltura or Ensemble) that has tools which allow for captioning of a video, the use of speech recognition software or human captioning. Check with the appropriate offices at your institution for additional information or resources.

YouTube.com and Amara.org are great free tools to manually caption videos.

YouTube

Pros: YouTube Links to an external site. has a robust closed captioning tool. It provides several different options for captioning videos. For this reason, using YouTube is often the quickest way to caption a short video. YouTube provides step-by-step guides on all the different captioning options.

One useful feature of YouTube is the option to allow videos to be captioned by the community. This option allows viewers to caption your video using a website like Amara.org.

Cons: YouTube automatically generates closed captions to uploaded videos using speech recognition software. Closed caption files generated using this method often contain a lot of errors. The owner of the video has to manually fix the errors or add a new accurate caption file for the video to be truly accessible.

Another drawback is creators have to upload the video to YouTube to use the caption editor. Also, the caption editor is only available for videos that the creator owns.

For more information on how to add captions to videos in YouTube review this webpage on Adding Closed Captions on YouTube.com. Links to an external site.

Amara

Transcript for Video: Captioning with Amara (6:15)

Pros: Amara Links to an external site. is user-friendly and has many useful features, but the primary benefit to using Amara is the user does not have to own the video or be the person who uploaded the video to create closed captions. Amara allows the user to caption a video from YouTube or Vimeo without downloading it or changing it in anyway. This is because Amara does not host videos; it just adds an overlay to existing videos.

Cons: Every captioning project on the website is open to the public. Not only can everyone see and download the captions, but they can also edit them.  Also, once a video link is submitted into Amara the captioning cannot be deleted from the website. 

Since Amara does not host videos, they will become unavailable if the owners delete or change them in YouTube or Vimeo.

Review the Amara Knowledge Base Links to an external site. for more information on how to add captions to videos using Amara.

Educational Multimedia Software

Many educational institutions buy licenses for software that allow educators to create interactive multimedia presentations and activities. Although not the primary purpose of the software, some provide built-in basic captioning tools. If your institution does not provide this type of software, doing an internet search will return a list of captioning software available for personal use.

A difficulty faced when looking for multimedia software is captioning tools are not always fully accessible. This can be determined by examining the VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) of the software.

Captioning Services

Captioning services are also commonly used by many institutions for captioning existing videos and live video events.

Estimated time: 17 minutes