About Amara

Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. The tools are free and open source and make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative.

The benefits of captioning and subtitling are immense:

• Captions make videos accessible for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing
• Translations make it possible for all of us to watch video in languages that we don't speak
• Video creators get: better SEO, more views, access to a far bigger (potentially multilingual and global) audience, accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and more

Amara is composed of three main parts:

• A subtitle creation and viewing tool (aka the widget)
• A collaborative subtitling website
• An open protocol for subtitle search/delivery

Everything we do is available under the open source AGPL license.

Our Organization

Participatory Culture Foundation is a non-profit organization building free and open tools for more a democratic and decentralized media. Other projects of ours include Miro, Miro Video Converter, Miro Community, and Open Video Alliance.

Amara is a featured project of Mozilla Drumbeat, and the Mozilla Foundation has provided development support. Open Society Institute and the MacArthur Foundation are also financial supporters.

Publisher and Enterprise Services

Amara offers a set of professional tools and services that enable publishers and video platforms to create and manage high quality subtitles. With Amara, you can build a community of volunteers to subtitle your content, integrate with professional services, and use a powerful quality control system to ensure world-class quality. To learn more, see our enterprise services and contact Dean Jansen, dean@pculture.org.