Students with hearing disabilities depend highly on captions and transcripts when audio is required for an activity. Providing captions and transcripts does not only help those with a hearing disability, but it can help many other students such as students where English is not their first language. For a better understanding of when to use captioning and when to use transcripts, please see UCOP's guide on When to use Transcription or Captioning.
Captioning + Transcription Options
UC Berkeley's Media Resource Center
The Media Resources Center assists instructors in locating captioned videos as well as captioning short clips. Many of the titles included in the Library's streaming video collections already include captions.
Email avmccirc@library.berkeley.edu as soon as possible if you identify a video you think you may need captioned.
3Play Media
The UC System has a contract in place with 3Play Media.
To get started, look at our help guide on how to Process a Purchase Order for 3Play Media to create an account and how to process a PO. Then, you can start uploading videos to 3Play Media for captioning. See the How-To Upload Videos guides for 3Play Media.
Other Tools & Services
- The How-To Caption YouTube Videos guide takes you step-by-step, with screenshots on how to make YouTube videos accessible to those who are hard of hearing. YouTube does the first pass with adding captions to your video. Then, you have the ability to easily navigate through the video and fix any errors within the video.
- The National Center on Disability and Access to Education's website also has a great visual guide on how to Caption YouTube Videos
- How to leverage YouTube automatic captioning to caption your media file
- Amara: Great and free tool to use for short video captioning and for translations.
- Rev: Captions videos at $1/minute for day-to-day (non-technical) speech.
- Cielo24: Provides captioning and transcription services.
UCOP has many helpful guides on how to caption and make transcriptions of videos. UCOP's guide on how to Create Transcripts takes you step-by-step on how to create a transcript of an audio file. Once the transcription is complete, the next step is to use the transcript to create captions. There are free captioning tools available for public use. Please visit UCOP's Captioning Tools page to get the list of available sources.
Note: Joeclark.org provides great detail on best practices when doing online captioning.