Let’s talk about… YouTube Captioning

Adding captions to your YouTube videos offers visitors alternate ways to participate.  It is a good addition to your web accessibility. It opens up your content (and services) to a larger audience including deaf, hard of hearing and those who speak English as a second language.

The University of Michigan offers a useful web accessibility guide.

Blackboard.com offers a best practice guide.

YouTube offers automatic captioning when you upload your videos.  This help page offers instructions and options for creating subtitles or closed captions, automatic captioning and other transcription suggestions.

USE AUTOMATIC CAPTIONING

  1. Go to your Video Manager by clicking your account in the top right > Creator Studio > Video Manager > Videos.
  2. Next to the video you want to add captions or subtitles to, click the drop-down menu next to the Edit button.
  3. Select Subtitles and CC.

MANAGE CAPTION SETTINGS

Turning on/off, default settings, size and style etc instructions are available.

THIRD PARTY OPTIONS

If your video is over 10 minutes and wasn’t produced using a transcript (and isn’t working well with the YouTube automatic captioning tool when you reupload it), consider a 3rd party to work with.

NEXT STEPS:

  1. COMPLETE AN AUDIT OF VIDEOS Where are the videos used? When were they uploaded? And where (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook)? When were they created?  How many views? Is there a download transcript available? Are there captions?
  2. DECIDE WHICH VIDEOS CAN BENEFIT BY CAPTIONING Based on the audit results, create a list of which videos need captioning.  Which videos could use a downloadable transcript?
  3. DOWNLOAD AND RE-UPLOAD TO YOUTUBE USING THE AUTOMATIC CAPTIONING Save the videos from YouTube and add them back using the automatic captioning instructions.  Create a transcript as a PDF to link in the description area of the video. You can store the PDFs on the website.
  4. IF THAT DOESN’T WORK, CONSIDER A 3rd PARTY SERVICE See list above.
  5. MOVING FORWARD Make sure all videos have a transcript available that you can use for captioning and download.

If you need assistance, please contact us to help create a YouTube captioning plan!