So you've just recorded a video and it's been added to your Kaltura media repository ("My Media"). What can you do to ensure it's accessible? Well, at this point you have two main concerns: captions and an audio description.
Ensure Caption Accuracy
Captions are text that displays onscreen indicating spoken words and relevant sounds. Because you uploaded your video to Kaltura, however, your video should have machine-generated captions within about 30 minutes of it being in a ready status. This means that you can focus on correcting captions rather than creating them from scratch, saving you a lot of time.
When you're editing (or creating) your captions, here are a few tips to keep them compliant:
- Identify speakers when necessary. If there's more than one speaker, be sure to distinguish who's speaking. Zoom does this automatically in its machine captions based on the user's login information but for other videos you'll have to do this yourself.
- Don't include filler words. If there are "ums" and "ers," you can safely leave these out. If a sound isn't important for comprehension, including it just adds clutter.
- Use brackets to indicate relevant sounds. This could include things
like
[applause],[door creaks],[upbeat music], or[laughter]. - Use "[inaudible]" if the audio truly isn't recoverable. Sometimes you just can't understand what a speaker has said, so be sure to indicate that in the captions.
- Indicate tone only when it affects meaning. In an academic setting this
is admittedly rare, but sometimes qualifiers like
[whispers],[sarcastic], or[enthusiastically]are relevant to the meaning of the spoken words. - Use good punctuation. Automated speech recognition (ASR) does its best, but correcting punctuation can greatly enhance readability and comprehension.
- Avoid unnecessary formatting. Caption files are plain text anyway (no bold or italics allowed). Use ALL CAPS if someone shouts, though.
It sounds like a lot, but most of these guidelines are pretty intuitive. If it helps, check out our tips on how to expedite the caption editing process.
When it comes to editing your captions, you have several options.
Edit the Captions Online
One option is to use Kaltura’s built-in web caption editor to edit your captions, which lets you fix errors right inside your browser. You can play your video, edit individual caption lines, adjust timings, and all changes will be immediately applied to the entry's captions. You can do this within Canvas or MediaSpace as long as you're either the media's owner or co-editor.
Edit Captions Offline
If you prefer a local workflow, you can download the caption file (usually a .srt or .vtt file) and edit it in a plain text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac). After you make corrections, you upload the updated file back into Kaltura and either hide or delete the unedited captions.
Use the Transcript Alignment Tool
Another option is to leverage Kaltura's so-called "machine alignment" tool. To do this, you download the transcript (a text file that doesn't contain any timecodes), make your edits in a local text editor, and then upload it using the machine alignment feature. Kaltura will automatically add timings to your revised text, creating a caption file to sync with the spoken audio. Sometimes it can be easier to deal with a text file that isn't full of timecodes. This feature is also particularly handy if you used a script for your video, since you can basically just upload it and let Kaltura figure out the whole caption thing for you.
Request Professional Captioning
Lastly, if you're short on time but not on budget, you can upload your video to an online captioning service like 3Play Media or Cielo24 and pay for professional captions. You can then upload the finished product just as you would if you were editing them offline.
Add An Audio Description
An audio description is a separate audio track for a video where a voice describes all relevant visual content during breaks in the audio. If there aren't enough gaps in the video's audio, though, an extended audio description is required, which will pause the video to allow for enough time for the descriptive narration.
Hire a Professional Services Vendor
There are a variety of vendors from which to choose, such as 3Play Media, Cielo24, Rev, and many others, all of whom have competitive pricing. As of February 2026, UC San Diego is investigating institution-wide pricing among competing vendors. For educational content, costs typically range from $5 to $20 per minute of media with turnaround times between 5 and 10 days.
Once produced, extended audio descriptions can be added by front-end users. If standard audio descriptions need to be added, users will need to contact kaltura@ucsd.edu.
Create an Extended Audio Description
As mentioned above, Kaltura currently (February 2026) only supports the upload of extended audio descriptions on the front end (not standard audio descriptions). Though the process is time-consuming and technically difficult, it is possible. See our KBA Create an Audio Description for a Kaltura Media Entry for more information.
Preclude the Need for Audio Descriptions
With this in mind, the best thing you can do going forward is to preclude the need for audio descriptions. Be careful to describe any relevant visual content. See our tips on how to handle visual information.