Captioning

Last Updated: 04/05/2018

Overview

The captioning service is a part of the campus-wide Accessibility Initiative aimed at fostering an accessible campus environment. The primary focus of this service is meeting captioning needs for accommodation requests and public-facing academic content. We also provide faculty, staff, and students with information, consultation, and guidance about closed captioning techniques, workflows, and policy.

What we do

The captioning service exists to assist you in meeting captioning needs related to University policy and standards by:

  • Facilitating captioning via third-party vendors
  • Providing resources and training to help you create your own captions
  • Consulting with faculty, staff, and students about their particular captioning needs and how to fulfill them.

Why Should You Caption?

Closed captioning allows individuals with a hearing disability 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 public-facing content is closed captioned. This is addressed in our campus accessibility policy standards; public content representing a department should have closed captioning available. This ensures that anyone interested in learning more about CU Boulder and its departments is able to do so.

How Do You Caption?

There are two ways: using a third-party vendor or creating your own captions. The captioning service can help you submit captioning requests to a vendor; pricing varies from $1/min to $5/min depending on the turnaround time needed and the source of your video content.

If you have students, employees, or volunteers who can caption content, the captioning service has resources available to support that. You can also email captioning@colorado.edu to request in-person training or consultations for no cost.

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