How to Caption Videos in YouTube

You’ve uploaded an awesome video to YouTube. You found a very good opportunity to talk about it in a conference, and you are happy because most of the people like it too. But you notice a particular group who couldn’t quite agree with you.

You find out that the group consisted of persons who are deaf and hard of hearing. Thinking for a few minutes, you realized that although deaf people could see the video, they can’t hear the audio, which incidentally plays a major part in the video’s excellence.

What are you going to do then? Well, if you truly value your efforts and would like everyone to enjoy what you did, you would provide captions for your video.

Captions in your YouTube video are very helpful to your viewers. This feature enables persons with hearing impairments to understand the spoken parts of your video. Captions also help hearing people who prefer reading content instead of listening to it, and those who wish to learn a new language.

Here are the steps in captioning your videos in YouTube. You may be surprised that this seemingly complex task only involves common web browsing procedures, not to mention it would also greatly enhance the accessibility of your video content.

Creating Your Caption File

The caption file contains the text format of the spoken parts in your video. Basically, you need to listen to the spoken parts, type them down in a word document, and save it as a text file. If you can’t create the transcript or if you don’t have the time to do it, you can ask someone to transcribe it for you.

To make it easier for YouTube to provide correct timing for your captions, you need to keep in mind these simple yet important procedures:

• Place a double line break between two lines of text if you want to create a caption break between them.
• Use the >> tag at the start of a new line to indicate a speaker or a change of speaker.
• To provide textual descriptions for sounds and sound effects, place the textual description inside square brackets. Example: [music], [thunder].

Adding Your Caption File to Your Video

Once you have created and formatted your caption file, sign in to your YouTube account, and follow these easy steps:

• Activate the Account link.
• Next, activate the “My Videos” link. Under the Uploaded Videos heading, you will find the videos you have uploaded in YouTube.
• Locate the video you want to caption, and activate the Captions button beside it.
• Activate the Add New Captions or Transcript button.
• Activate the Browse button and find the caption file in your hard drive.
• Select the radio button for “Caption File”.
• Select the language of your caption file on the Language combo box. Optionally, you can provide a name for the caption file.
• Activate the “Upload File” button.

Editing the Captions

While viewing the video, you may find errors in the timing of the captions or you may just want to tweak the captions a bit. To edit the captions, sign in to your account and go to the video. Go to the “Captions and Subtitles” pane and locate the “English: Machine Transcription" track. Activate the Download button next to this track.

This will download and save a file called captions.sbv to your computer. This file contains the video’s transcript and timecode information. You can use a text editor or a caption software to open and edit the file.

YouTube’s AutoCaption Feature

You also have an option to automatically create captions for your video. To do this, go to the video you want to caption. Then go to the “Captions and Subtitles” pane and activate “Request Processing”. Check after a few hours or a few days to see if your video already has captions.