Video and Multimedia Tools
Resources and links are for information purposes only, no endorsement implied.
Accessible audio and video content must have equivalent transcripts and/or captions. Descriptive text transcripts or audio descriptions should also be used for video. Often, hiring a vendor to transcribe audio and add video captions is more cost effective than doing it in-house, but there are tools available to help.
Audio Descriptions
An alternate caption track enables low-vision or blind users to experience visual cues and/or action sequences by listening to a narration of events.
Captions and Transcripts
Many applications and vendors feature both transcription and captioning services. Resources listed may provide transcription, captioning or a combination of both.
Desktop Applications
- Telestream MacCaption (OS X) or CaptionMaker (Win)
- Camtasia (Mac or Windows) – Also available through sell.tamu.edu
- MAGpie (Windows)
- SubTitle Workshop (Windows)
- MovieCaptioner (Windows, Mac)
Web-based Applications
Vendors
- 3Play Media
- CaptionSync by AST
- Cielo24 (crowdsourced; not recommended for confidential or proprietary information)
- Rev.com (crowdsourced; not recommended for confidential or proprietary information)
- “YouTube Ready” Qualified Captioning Vendors (quality certified by the DCMP)
- DCMP Captioning Services (resource list of captioning services)
- uiAccess (resource list of transcription services, with rates included)
Do-it-yourself Captions and Transcripts
- AMARA – Upload a video and easily subtitle and edit the captioning (free)
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking Utilize dictation software (fee based on version)
- YouTube Captions and Transcripts – Transcribe and caption a video through a step-by-step process; very basic machine translation that needs human editing (free)
See the NCDAE.org web tutorial and PDF. - VLC Media Player – Produce a transcription for your video using this open-source multi-media player with good editing controls (free)
- Express Scribe Transcription – Produce transcripts using editing software (free and professional versions)
Learn More
Did you know?
- In the United States, about 55 million people have a disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- About 1 in 5 Americans have some kind of disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- The percentage of people affected by disabilities is growing as our population ages.
- Two popular, free screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac OS and iOS) and NVDA (Win).
- Good accessibility practices can improve the search ranking of your website.
- Form fields without labels can cause problems for some assistive technology users.
- Low color contrast makes content difficult to see, especially for users with low vision.
- Documents linked on a website need to be accessible too (e.g., PDF and Word files).
- Audio content, like podcasts, need transcripts for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Online videos should be captioned for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Using HTML tags correctly is very important for accessibility.
- Descriptive link text helps make a website more accessible. Avoid using "Click here" or "Read more."
- A "screen reader" is an application that reads content aloud to a user.
- There is no "alt tag" in HTML. "Alt" is an attribute used with the img tag.
- HTML uses the alt attribute to provide a text description of an image.
- Alt text should describe an image, if the purpose of the image is to convey information.
- If an image is a link, the alt text for the image should explain where the link goes.
- If an image is only being used for decoration, the alt text should be null (i.e., alt="").
- If a table has headers, using header tags (<th>) will make the table more accessible.
- An accessible website is one that can be navigated and understood by everyone.