This guide is intended for faculty who know they have a student with a post-production captioning accommodation in their course and would like to get started ahead of time in preparing to provide this accommodation. Please consult the Disability Services guide to post-production captioning accommodations for more information about the overall process.

There are a few things you can do before the semester starts to make this process move more quickly in the event your student does submit their captioning accommodation request.

  1. Review your course materials now. Check through your course materials for the semester to see if you have any audio or video content – and if you do – make a list of the items and the dates by which the students will need to access them. Check to see if captions are available for any of the media and, if so, whether they are accurate. 

    Automated captions like those created by YouTube, Zoom Cloud, and Canvas Studio are not accurate enough to meet accommodation requests, and will need to be replaced with human-created captions. If the words English (auto-generated) appear in the top-left of a YouTube video when you click the "CC" button to turn on captions in YouTube, then the video will need to be re-captioned by the captioning service. 

    Click gear icon for settings. 

  2. If you will be creating digital lecture recordings for remote instruction, we recommend hosting the media files in Kaltura (My Media) in Canvas for the fastest turnaround. OIT has a tutorial available to help you upload video content to My Media; a separate tutorial will explain how to share video content with students by embedding My Media content in a Canvas Page. Storing videos in Canvas Files is not recommended; it will result in slower turnaround times for captioning, which means you will need to share your materials with the captioning service further in advance of when the student will need to access them.
  3. Let students know if video or audio materials will be required for your course. A good time to do this is on the first day of class. When you review your syllabus with your students, make it a point to mention if multimedia content is present in your course, and then let them know captioning and transcription services are available upon request. 
  4. Know what to do if you receive a request. If a student asks you for a captioning accommodation request, you will need to submit the Captioning Service Request Form. It asks for basic information about your course and the media to be captioned. Please contact the captioning service as soon as you receive a request so that we can ensure your course materials will be captioned in time. Remember, within 5 days after a student has submitted a request, all media used in your course must have accurate captioning available at the time the student is asked to access the media. After the initial 5 days, if you wish to add media content and there is not sufficient time to get it captioned, you must ensure that it already has accurate captions or find alternative captioned media. 
  5. Know your responsibilities under campus policy. The CU Boulder Digital Accessibility Standards describe your responsibilities with captioning in section 2(b). 

If you have further questions about the captioning service or captioning standards, please feel free to reach out to captioning@colorado.edu.