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We’ve just created a web accessibility channel in YouTube. We’d like to invite you all to check out our videos, subscribe to the channel, and add us up as your friend.

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.

All YouTube videos can now carry captions created by speech recognition software in a move that the Google-owned video sharing site said would improve the
videos' accessibility.

The move has been welcomed by groups representing deaf and hard-of-hearing users as an important step in ensuring that non-textual online content is accessible
to people with hearing problems.

Disability advocates are demanding that government do more to increase the accessibility of the Internet and broadband devices, especially mobile phones.
And their pleas haven't fallen on deaf ears.

Congressman Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and former chairman of the House's Internet subcommittee, introduced a bill in Congress last year
that would require providers of Internet services and devices -- from desktop computers to smart phones -- to make user interfaces accessible to people
with disabilities. The bill, still in committee, has more than two dozen sponsors.

SEATTLE - Most web sites that feature videos do not offer closed captioning, although a bill in Congress would require it. In Seattle, Thomas Verdos, who has had a hearing impairment since birth, says captions make all the difference in understanding the content of the site or program.

"You might compare it to watching television with the sound off. You don't get the story line, nothing's humorous, if you don't have the volume high enough to hear what's being said. Most people don't think about it - they don't have to think about it."