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Accessible Technology Initiative

What are Captions?

Captions are text representations of speech and other audio content that are synced in time as the original source materials are played.

Which Items must be Captioned?

According to the Chancellor's Office captioning prioritization guidelines  the following items have a high priority for captions:

  • Multimedia items where an accommodation is requested from a student, staff member, or another person who requires captioning.
  • Multimedia items that will be shared multiple times and/or over an extended period of time.
  • Multimedia items that are reused in new courses and newly revised segments of existing courses.
  • Multimedia items that are used in a course for more than one semester.
  • Multimedia items that are on a public facing web page (e.g., commencements or other public-facing streamed or recorded events, news, and marketing videos).

Captioning Instructional Materials

OIT has a budget to have materials that are required for classroom instruction captioned by a professional captioning service, Automatic Sync Technologies. Contact Glenn Pillsbury (gpillsbury@csustan.edu) or Jerry Anderson (janderson@csustan.edu) to discuss how to take advantage of this service.

Services Available for Multimedia Accessibility

  • Video Encoding - the creation of a new MP4 video file with the captioning appearing in the subtitle field, or burned into the video as Open Captions.
  • Translation - translation of existing CaptionSync caption files to either Spanish, French, Portuguese, or English.
  • Result Review - an additional review/repair service for video with very noisy audio or for client-provided transcripts.
  • DVD Authoring - allows users to mail in VHS tapes or video DVDs and have them returned as captioned DVD media and/or electronic MP4 file.
  • Production Transcripts - generation of full transcripts of the media file with a periodic time stamp. Timestamps are typically placed at every speaker change, and periodically within a speaker’s monologue. CaptionSync allows users to select the frequency of time stamps to suit needs.
  • Live Captioning - real-time CART services and remote text-interpreting services.
  • Audio Description - Creation of webVTT Audio Description files for html5 players supporting W3C Audio Description technique H96.
  • Transcription - Creation of a text transcript from a client-provided media file.  This service is available in multiple turnaround times, including 2-3 day, 1 day, and 8 hour.
  • Captioning - Creation of timed caption and/or subtitle files from a client-provided transcript.
  • Transcription & Captioning - Creation of a text transcript and caption/subtitle files from a client-provided media file.  This service is available in multiple turnaround times, including 2-3 day, 1 day, and 8 hour.

Captioning Non-Instructional Materials

Creators of non-instructional content (e.g., faculty research items or live captioning for events) may also take advantage of Automatic Sync Technologies's captioning service via a chargeback from OIT.  Contact either Glenn Pillsbury (gpillsbury@csustan.edu) or Jerry Anderson (janderson@csustan.edu) to discuss your project.

Ready to submit your request? Use the link below to begin.

Non-Instructional Captioning Request Form

Other Resources for Captioning

Captioning YouTube videos – Content that has been uploaded to YouTube can be captioned automatically by YouTube or have a manually generated caption file attached to the video by the owner. Automatic Sync Technologies can be used to create the caption file. NOTE: Automatic YouTube captions should be reviewed for accuracy and corrected to provide quality captions.

Captioning Camtasia Studio videos – Camtasia projects can be captioned in a few ways, depending on whether the content is being created in Windows or Mac OS X.

Captioning Screencast-O-Matic projects

Adding captions

Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT)

Video Accessibility Principles Datasheet

Updated: April 17, 2024