Most colleges and universities have policies that require multimedia to be accessible to all. The more multimedia you use, the more this means you'll have to get help getting videos captioned or caption them yourself. If you decide to do some captioning yourself, there are a few free and inexpensive programs that make the process easy.

Before you begin, you should decide how you would like your captioning to appear. You have two choices: open or closed captioning. Open captioning means that the captions are burned into your movie file for every viewer to see; whereas, closed captioning means they are embedded within the movie and can be made accessible on demand.

Personally, I prefer closed captions especially if the materials are online. Let the viewer make the decision! You may have noticed that YouTube now has a closed captioning option. See a short video here Explanation of Captioning in YouTube

If you have YouTube videos posted, you can also try CaptionTube . To use CaptionTube you need a Google email address to log on. Once logged on, select the upload personal video (from YouTube) and then select edit. It's a fairly straight forward process from there on. When you are happy with your captions, select Export Captions. There are several choices here. You can export captions as a file or export your captions as either a "sub" or "srt" file. For YouTube select "sub" and download it to your computer. While on the same screen now select the link "Captions and Subtitles page." This takes you to your video at YouTube. Now you can just upload the file and add it to your video. Presto! Your video is closed captioned.

If you are of the Mac persuasion, there's another simple program that captions Quicktime movies at a reasonable price -MovCaptioner. You can download a demo at synchrimedia.com. There are several nice features in MovCaptioner. You can import a text file or caption as you watch. As well as your captioned video, you can download different types of files and a transcript of your video.

To view an 8 minute tutorial on MovCaptioner see




I have to warn you that the demo version doesn't last long, so if you want MovCaptioner, you'll have to pay the $25 US. The simplicity and options made it well worth the price.

If you use a PC there's a free app, you might try called URUWorks
For a good site with lots of information on captioning see Caption it Yourself

Happy Captioning!