Accessible multimedia means that videos, audio recordings, and live sessions include captions, transcripts, or audio descriptions so all members of the UCLA community can participate. It's also a legal requirement under UCLA's digital accessibility policy.

UCLA has three main resources in this area, each aimed at a different audience and context. Here's how to figure out which one you need.

Teaching a course in Bruin Learn?

Start with the Teaching & Learning Center’s Video and Audio: Captions and Transcripts guide. When you use video or audio content in your Bruin Learn site, it must include text-based alternatives so all users can access it. The good news: UCLA's common media tools, including Zoom and Kaltura, will generate captions for you automatically — but you're still responsible for reviewing them for errors.

This guide covers:

• Enabling automated captions in Zoom for course meetings, discussion sections, and office hours
• Kaltura, Bruin Learn's video hosting and streaming service, which automatically generates captions and an interactive transcript for uploaded media
• How to edit auto-generated captions in Kaltura when the automated output needs correction

Key takeaways for instructors: 

Use Kaltura to save course media in Bruin Learn, ensure automated captions are enabled in Zoom settings, and review auto-generated captions and transcripts to correct errors as needed.

Hosting a Zoom meeting, not a class?

The Disabilities and Computing Program’s UCLA Zoom Accessibility page is the right resource for staff and event organizers running Zoom meetings with accessibility considerations. It covers situations the TLC guide doesn't, including:

• Live captioning for Zoom meetings: if closed captioning is needed for Deaf or hard-of-hearing staff or faculty, contact IRM for a live captioning accommodation
• Tips for meetings with screen reader users, such as how to handle participant lists, screen sharing, and chat
• General presentation etiquette for accessible sessions, including how to describe visual content, send materials in advance, and let participants know accommodations are available

Note: UCLA does not currently have automated captioning enabled for Zoom Cloud Recordings, so live meetings don't get the same automatic captioning that Bruin Learn course recordings do.

Creating content for UCLA’s web or social channels?

The UCLA Brand Guidelines’ Accessibility: Audio and Video resource is for anyone producing or publishing multimedia for UCLA's web and social presence. A few things worth knowing before you go there:

Platform captioning works differently depending on where you're posting. YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo support closed captions, so you can correct auto-generated captions within those platforms; but auto-generated captions are not considered sufficient for ADA compliance on their own and must be proofread before publishing. Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn don't support closed captions at all, so open captions (burned into the video) are required for those platforms.

If you need captioning help and don't want to do it yourself, the UC has a master service agreement with 3Play Media that any UCLA department can use. It includes discipline-specific transcriptionists, accent and technical vocabulary expertise, and Spanish captioning, with a standard three-business-day turnaround.

The page also covers transcripts, audio descriptions, and live captioning tools (including Zoom, Dynamic Captioning, and StreamText) for webcast events and conferences.

Quick reference: which resource do I need?