What is Amara? 

Amara is a free to use website that hosts hundreds of videos for people to access captioned versions of videos that otherwise would not have said captions. It's a PCF organization providing a public workspace where we can collaborate with people (even outside of Disability Services here at ISU,) and provide good captioned videos. It doesn't have an AI, as it's old school tech. The results and use are above and beyond. 

Without Amara, we would be stuck using 3rd party- YouTube or Vimeo- videos that don't have captions, or even AI captions. Honestly, we have tried hundreds of times to get a response from the video owners (even if we somehow could find their contact information,) just to include the captions we made or even if they could turn on their AI subtitle generator. And a lot were posted at least seven years ago. Yeah, No luck. So we use Amara. 

Another key point for you to know is that Amara is the last stop to transcript. If we can't do that then you video choice fails to meet Title II and ADA compliance. It would mean you will need to go fish for an alternative replacement that does. 

How does it work? 

When you click on a video link in Canvas that takes you to Amara, it will ask for you to create a new account. What you will need to do is to create one with your ISU email (Google) account. Once your Amara account has been associated with your student or staff account, you will be able to access the system by clicking on the access via Google account button. 

From that point it will be a Click on video link> Click on Google account > right into viewing the video.

Super easy.  

 If it's free, why the account requirement? 

With the hunger for textual data of AIs to learn, Amara quickly became a target resource for them. This created server overloads and system crashes resulting in 403 errors. To block the consistent attacks, users are now required to have a human account. 

A response email from Amara in Fall 2025: 

"We recently changed settings to temporarily require logging in to view public videos. While we avoid creating any blocks for easy access, requesting people to have an account to view your videos protects everyone by preventing third parties using those subtitles without our consent to train Language Learning Models (LLMs). 

Anyone can still view videos for free simply by creating an Amara login through the Amara sign up page. The service is still entirely free and open to anyone who creates a free account and verifies their email address so the site is not affected by automated systems.

We want to assure all users that creating an account is private, and we never share or sell your information to third parties.

Implementing these changes to the Amara.org platform maintains access for all the free public users, as well as our professional and private teams on Amara to be sure everyone still has access without getting 403 errors."

Bad, Bad, Bad AI that is a no no.