The following page reviews video captioning resources reviewed by the Information Technology Services (ITS) accessibility team.

Table of Contents

About Captioning


About Cart Services (Live Captioning)

While third party speech-to-text products, such as Otter.ai, exist for live-captioning, ITS recommends that professional captioning be used whenever an accommodation is requested or whenever our policy requires that an event has live captioning. See Guidelines for CART and ASL Interpreting for more information.


About Audio Description

  • Audio description (sometimes referred to as Described Video) is provided by a trained describer that provides descriptions of the visual components of the video. Audio description makes video accessible to blind/visually-impaired persons who would otherwise miss out on information presented visually. This information is synchronized with the video, but provided in a separate sound track.
  • For a full description and example of audio description, see the Penn State whitepaper titled An Introduction to Audio Description in Higher Education Video Content


Captioning of Recorded Videos from Popular Platforms

Many of our campus video and web conferencing platforms have some level of support for captioning, but in most cases we recommend using Kaltura as your primary video storage and captioning tool.

  • Blackboard Collaborate Recordings
    • Blackboard Collaborate does not have automatic captioning functionality, so you must have a caption file created outside of Collaborate.
    • If professional captions are desired they can be obtained from a captioning vendor such as AST/CaptionSync in VTT or SRT format and uploaded to Collaborate.
    • Recommend downloading Collaborate recordings to Kaltura for captioning/storage.
  • Google Meet Recordings
    • Google Meet does not have automatic captioning functionality.
    • Recommend downloading Meet recordings and importing to Kaltura for captioning/storage
  • Kaltura MediaSpace Captioning
    • Videos created or uploaded to Kaltura will have automatic captioning applied which should then be cleaned up using Kaltura’s captioning editor.
    • If professional captions are desired they can be obtained from a captioning vendor such as AST/CaptionSync in SRT format and uploaded to Kaltura.
  • Microsoft Teams Recordings
    • Recordings are saved to Microsoft Stream where automatic captioning is applied and can be cleaned up using the Stream caption editor, or import the video to Kaltura for automatic captioning and cleanup using the Kaltura caption editor.
    • If professional captions are desired recommend requesting SRT format and importing to Kaltura.
  • Zoom Recordings
    • Zoom applies automatic captioning to meeting recordings
    • Zoom editor can be used to clean-up/edit captions in Zoom (Note: Zoom caption file results in captions that contain too much text per line and too many lines per timestamp, which can’t be changed easily.)
    • Recommend importing recording to Kaltura and either working with the automatic captions there, or requesting professional captions in SRT format for upload to Kaltura.


Live Captioning of Events on Popular Platforms

Note: When determining how best to provide live captions for your event please consult Guidelines for CART and ASL Interpreting. 

  • Blackboard Collaborate
    • Moderator assigns captioner role to attendee, usually a professional captioner.
    • Note: Live captions will be available as closed captions on the recorded video in Blackboard, but live captions rarely meet the standard of quality required for recorded video so captioning of recording will still be required.
  • Google Meet
    • Automatic live captions are available during the session.
    • Note: Live captions are not available for download or for use in closed captioning of recording.
  • Microsoft Teams
    • Microsoft Teams does not support a live, professional captioner and the quality of the automatic captions is not sufficient.
    • Note: Live captions are not available for download after the meeting.
  • Zoom
    • Moderator assigns captioner role to attendee, usually a professional captioner
    • Live captions (generally poorer quality) are retained in the recorded version as closed captions in Zoom, and automatically generated captions (generally higher quality) of recording are available as ‘Audio transcript’ in Zoom.
    • Transcript of live captions should be requested if desired as they will not be exported to Kaltura. Note: Zoom and Kaltura will autocaption the recording as described previously.


Captioning Vendors


Do-It-Yourself