A New Chapter for Amara.org: Evolving to Better Serve Media Accessibility
Since 2010, Amara.org has been on a mission to make audio and video content accessible to everyone, everywhere. Our subtitling editor has empowered communities around the world to create transcripts, captions, and subtitles in more than 400 languages. That mission continues, and it’s as important today as when we started.
Over the years, media accessibility has also evolved, expanding its reach to foster a more inclusive society. We’ve witnessed many of these changes, and we’re excited to continue being part of this journey. Therefore, we’re sharing some exciting news about where Amara is headed next.
Our Foundation: People First
When the Participatory Culture Foundation launched the Amara Subtitling Editor more than 15 years ago, the tools for making media accessible were few and far between. We built a public platform where anyone, anywhere, could volunteer their time and skills to bring video content to a wider audience, regardless of hearing ability or language. That spirit of inclusion and community has always been at the heart of what we do.
As an organization designing technologies to help advance media accessibility, nothing we do would be possible without the human-led teams and communities, language experts, volunteers, and professionals who help to make video and audio genuinely accessible to those for whom captions and subtitles are essential to access media content.
Therefore, Amara’s mission and focus will continue to be the development of tools and solutions to support human-led community efforts for:
- Accurate, readable, and accessible transcripts and captions for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing, and anyone who needs captions for understanding and enjoying content in both audio and video formats.
- Subtitle Translation that makes valuable content available to audiences around the world. Human translators bring not only their knowledge of a target language, but their understanding of its cultural context, significance, and nuances that elevate the translation from the simplistic view of a word-to-word transference to a translation of meaning and sense.
- The preservation of indigenous and minority languages. AI-generated captions and translations rely heavily on existing digital content to train their LLMs. But there are still many other languages that only actual speakers can transcribe, caption, and translate them accurately. Amara will continue to develop tools and solutions to aid these collaborative efforts to preserve minority and indigenous languages, thus creating a digital archive for future generations.
What’s Next: The Future We’re Building
Even after witnessing significant technological advances in the last 15 years, one constant is the need to support media content accessibility for audiences everywhere, independently of their abilities or the language they speak.
With all the buzz around generative AI, many believe that automatic captions and machine translations in popular video hosting platforms or social media channels have resolved the issue of media accessibility. However, these auto-generated captions and translations are still riddled with errors that not only look silly or laughable at times, but can actually be confusing or harmful to those who are essentially relying on these features to access media content.
Only human expertise can produce high-quality, accurate, and culturally appropriate closed captions, transcripts, and subtitles in multiple languages. AI is only a tool to help drive efficiency, and it shouldn’t replace skilled language professionals who bring invaluable judgment, creativity, and deep cultural knowledge and understanding of the target language and audience to their work.
In the next chapter, Amara will focus on developing and improving tools and solutions in areas where human-led expertise is still key to advancing media accessibility further.
We’re turning our energy toward developing the next generation of media accessibility tools, such as:
- A more powerful Subtitling Editor — with deeper customization of style guidelines, technical requirements, glossaries, and contextual references to ensure consistency across captions, subtitles, and translations.
- Audio description and interactive transcription for people who are blind or have low vision.
- Dubbing and voiceover solutions to break language barriers in entirely new ways.
- An enhanced Video Player supporting additional accessibility features, such as audio-described tracks or dubbing in other languages.
These are the innovations that will define the next era of accessibility, and we can’t wait to work on them. As a nonprofit, we need to focus our efforts and resources where we can generate the most positive impact moving forward.
Continuing to develop better technologies for organizations and communities working with human-led efforts to advance genuine media accessibility and preserve indigenous and minority languages is where Amara is heading next.
Amara Public Workspace Closing on April 30, 2026
To better focus our resources on the exciting work ahead, we will be closing the Amara Public Workspace on April 30, 2026.
We know this is significant news for many of you, and we want to make this transition as smooth as possible. Here’s what you need to know:
- Videos uploaded and subtitled in the Amara Public Workspace will need to be migrated to a Private team to remain accessible after April 30, 2026.
- Private teams with videos set to “Public” visibility will continue to be fully viewable by all Amara users, and will remain shareable and embeddable via their Amara URL — nothing changes there.
- If you’re passionate about volunteering to make media accessible, our volunteer teams will still be active and available, with many wonderful organizations using Amara where your skills are needed and valued. You can find opportunities to get involved here.
- If you want to save subtitles created previously in the Amara Public Workspace, you have until April 30, 2026, to download them. Select the language under Completed Subtitles, and then click on Download to select the format.
Continuing Your Accessibility Journey with Amara
If you’ve been using the Amara Public Workspace to share subtitled content, we’d love to have you continue your accessibility journey with us.
All Amara’s private team solutions offer access to Amara’s multi-award-winning Subtitle Editor to transcribe, caption, and subtitle in more than 400 languages.
- Amara Orders Workspace: Private workspace for single users. Available here once you sign up to Amara.
- Amara Plus: The perfect solution for smaller teams with easy sign-up right from this page: Amara Plus.
- Amara Enterprise: A scalable solution for larger teams with customizable workflows. You can choose between a per-seat or per-minute subscription, allowing you to select the most efficient model as your team grows, and ensuring your costs scale naturally with your work. Contact enterprise@amara.org for more information.
- Amara Integrated: a unique solution that allows you to embed the Amara Subtitling Editor in your own CMS or website. Contact enterprise@amara.org for more information.
- Amara On Demand professional services: In addition to the Amara Editor and Platform solutions, you can also order Professional Captions, Subtitles, and Translation from Amara On Demand.
Whether you’re a solo creator, a nonprofit, a higher education institution, or a large media organization, there’s an Amara plan that can keep your content accessible and your community engaged — now and long into the future.
Reach out at enterprise@amara.org, and we’ll help you find the right fit.
Thank You
None of this would have been possible without the incredible Amara community — the thousands of volunteers, creators, and organizations who believed in the power of accessible media and gave their time to make it a reality. Your contributions are the foundation on which everything else is built, and they’re what make the work ahead feel so worthwhile.
The future of media accessibility is bright. Amara will be right there helping to build it, always guided by our mission: developing technologies, services, and solutions to help make more video and audio content accessible to the world!
Stay tuned for more updates, and feel free to reach out to our team (enterprise@amara.org) with any questions.
