What We Do
The captioning service assists faculty, staff, and students in captioning audiovisual media in accordance with University digital accessibility policy and standards by:
- Fulfilling captioning accommodation requests on behalf of faculty, staff, and students with disabilities
- Facilitating the captioning of audiovisual materials through a captioning vendor on behalf of campus media creators
- Providing resources and training to help individuals understand and fulfill their captioning responsibilities under campus policy
- Consulting with individuals about their particular captioning processes and workflows
How Do I Caption Videos?
There are two ways to caption videos: use a vendor to caption your content or create the captions yourself. The captioning service can submit captioning requests to a vendor on your behalf; the cost starts at $1.28/min and can increase depending on the turnaround time needed and other factors. There will be no cost to you or your department if captioning is needed to fulfill a disability accommodation request. Submit the Request Captioning form to get started.
The captioning service also has resources to help individuals learn to caption content on their own. Faculty, staff, and students can email captioning@colorado.edu to request captioning training or consultations at no cost.
Why Should I Caption My Videos?
Closed captioning allows individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing to access the content of your videos. In the classroom, this is critical to ensure all students can learn with the course material provided. Additionally, closed captioning is beneficial to a wide variety of students, including those for whom English is not their primary language, those who learn best by reading, and those who have trouble focusing. In some video players, including YouTube, captions even can allow students to search through the text of a video for more efficient reviewing.
It is also important to ensure all public-facing content is closed captioned. The campus accessibility policy standards state that all public-facing audiovisual media that represents a campus department or service must have captioning available.