Accessibility Solutions for Higher Education

A complete media accessibility solution for higher education

Maximize accessibility and compliance with a platform that works at scale.

3Play Media helps institutions like Yale, MIT, and Penn State to make their media accessible, searchable, and multilingual for students. We provide high-quality and compliant transcripts, captions, audio descriptions, and more.

We offer unlimited downloads of 50+ caption formats from our user-friendly online platform. APIs and secure integrations with popular video and learning platforms, such as YouTube, Brightcove, and Kaltura make it easy to automate your media accessibility workflows.

Student and teacher in a college classroom.

Trusted by the world's leading colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions

How Higher Ed Stays Inclusive and Accessible with 3Play Media

Compliance

3Play Media’s captions comply with ADA Title II standards, Section 504 and Section 508 standards, the Section 508 refresh, and WCAG 2.0/2.1.

99%+ Accuracy

To comply with best practices and improve student comprehension, we guarantee over 99% accuracy. Our measured accuracy rate for closed captions is 99.6%.

Competitive Pricing

By leveraging technology and professional editors, we are able to provide a high quality product for a fraction of the cost, with flexible billing options to meet your school's dynamic needs.

Difficult Content

We assign technical content to professional transcriptionists with specific expertise in an array of subjects. We also help you elevate transcription quality even further with the ability to upload custom wordlists, speaker labels, glossaries, and more.

Real-Time Accommodations

Live accommodations that improve learning outcomes.

3Play Media provides highly accurate, reliable, and easy-to-schedule live captions that leave you feeling confident and prepared for your live lecture or event. We offer two types of live captioning, professional and automatic, that enable you to make your events more accessible for students.

3Play’s Live Professional Captioning service was developed with the student experience in mind. A truly equitable education experience requires that each student can fully comprehend the class material, which is impossible for students who rely on captions if they’re not completely accurate. 3Play Media’s Live Professional Captioning uses trained professionals and is complete with auto caption failover and failback options, as well as caption customization and post-event accessibility to make your live events run as smoothly as possible.

Our Live Automatic Captioning service is generated by automatic speech recognition technology. If there’s a disruption to live professional captions, our auto caption failover system switches to live automatic captions without interruption. Because auto-captions have a lower accuracy rate compared to human-powered live captions, professional captions are preferred for education-focused content.

Let's Talk About Real-Time Captioning Accommodations

Lecture in large classroom with accessibility symbol

Looking to elevate your students’ learning experiences and remove access barriers? Let’s connect!

FAQ: Real-Time Captioning in the College Classroom

How does captioning work in a college classroom?

Real-time captions in a live classroom setting can be delivered to a student through different mechanisms. If the student is present in person, they are usually receiving captions on a second screen, such as a tablet or laptop, using a solution known as Communication Access Realtime Translation, or CART.

For on-demand or remote classes that are not live, closed captions are usually provided in a sidecar file alongside the video recording, which can be toggled on or off by the user.

Who is captioning college classes?

For student accommodations in a live classroom, real-time captions are usually transcribed by a live professional captioner. Traditionally, CART utilized a stenographer or in-person captioner and displayed captions on a large screen.

Nowadays, remote CART captioning options and alternatives have become very common, with a remote captioner connecting to the classroom’s audio source, such as a clip-on microphone worn by a professor. The captioner then transcribes the lecture or discussion word-for-word, with live captions populating on a second screen or streaming link to the text.

What kinds of qualifications do live professional captioners have?

Real-time captions for college classrooms require a high degree of accuracy to provide an equivalent experience for students requesting accommodations. Live professional captioners should be experienced in providing accurate captions and following best practices for real-time captioning.

At 3Play, live professional captioners undergo a rigorous certification process and use 3Play’s innovative proprietary voice writing technology to produce accurate and comprehensive real-time captions.

How do real-time accommodation professionals order and pay for captions?

Higher education professionals usually have a wide range of needs for live accommodations: lectures, meetings, conferences, webinars, and more.

Ordering and billing needs are going to be different at every institution. 3Play takes a flexible approach to these aspects by giving professionals exactly what they need to track spending and budget, whether it’s full visibility into how the institution is spending on accessibility services like real-time captioning, or small-scale, single projects with specific purchase orders (P.O.s) attached.

Read more frequently asked questions about real-time captioning for higher education ⬇️

Real-Time Captioning in the College Classroom 101

Features

Accessibility and legal compliance is easier and more cost-effective with 3Play

Turnaround

Quality

Engagement Tools

API

Secure Account System

Scalability

Ready to grow with you

For educational institutions on an accessibility journey, finding an accessibility solution that can grow with you is a challenge. Our robust solution can uphold services at scale and is designed to grow as you grow. We built our system to handle large quantities of video per day without notice – always at 99% accuracy.

Plus, with our workforce of thousands of professional transcript editors and multiple turnaround options, you won’t need to worry about missing deadlines regardless of the amount of video that needs captioning.

Additionally, when you partner with 3Play Media, you can easily add other accessibility tools to your videos down the line. If you come to us only needing captions and audio description in the beginning but decide to add translation as your business grows, you can easily order any service through our online platform.

With advanced offerings like flexible workflows, a user-friendly online platform, strict deadline compliance, and white-glove support, there’s no job we can’t take on.

Seamless Integrations with Your Existing Learning Tools

Connect your favorite tools with 3Play

3Play Media offers integrations with over 20 leading video platforms, lecture capture software, and learning management systems. Easily connect to your existing higher education tools and take advantage of push-button simplicity so you can focus on what really matters: students’ learning experiences.

View Our Integrations

Accessibility

16 million adults in the United States live with a disability, and many of them are students. By 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss. Removing access barriers and providing an accessible experience to students with disabilities is imperative. Closed captions grant access to students with hearing loss and other disabilities by allowing them to read the words that are spoken in a video or during a class.

Comprehension

Captions and transcripts greatly increase learning comprehension and retention. The ability to simultaneously read and listen reinforces educational content for students. A study conducted by Oregon State University found that 75% of students who use captions see them as a learning aid, and 71% of students without hearing difficulties use captions at least some of the time. Read more about the study.

Searchability

Interactive transcripts highlight words as they are being spoken in a video. By typing a term into the search bar, students can see every instance of that keyword within the transcript. Clicking on one of the instances of the search term jumps students directly to that point in the video. In a survey with MIT’s OpenCourseWare, students shared about their experience with 3Play Media’s interactive transcripts in conjunction with their video lecture courses. When asked to rate the features of our interactive video transcript, 94% of respondents found one or more of our features “useful”. Students used interactive transcripts to learn at their own pace in a multi-sensory mode, improve their comprehension of difficult course material, and more. Learn more about the survey.