Thanks to Jamie Berke from Guide to Deafness at Deafness.about.com, we now have a guide to closed captioning your web series so deaf and hearing impaired viewers can also enjoy your series! Here are some of Jamie’s tips on closed captioning your show. If you do caption your web series, let us know by replying to this post, and we will post a separate list for hearing impaired viewers.
FREE OPTIONS ON YOUTUBE-
Here are the basics. First, upload your video. Then click on the “Captions” button on your “My Videos” page for the video you want to caption. Then do one of the following:
1) You can type up a transcript and manually upload it as “a new caption or transcript” in the “Captions” option on your video. YouTube will attempt to sync. As it is a transcript without timecode, it doesn’t always sync up exactly, but it is a start and way better than the automatic captions YouTube sometimes generates.
2) If you see a “Machine Transcription” available for your video, that is a caption track that YouTube automatically generated that has timecode. Their automatic transcript usually results in closed captions that are whacked out. Hence, why deaf viewers still can’t watch. But you can download this file and then edit the automatic captions yourself for accuracy.
3) Lastly, you can manually create the captions using the free VideoCritter.org website and then upload this file as a new caption or transcript.
Then go to your video, click on the CC at the bottom of the video and see if the captions sync while the video plays.
FREE OPTIONS ON DAILY MOTION–
If you are on DailyMotion.com, DailyMotion does have support for closed captioning. You can use UniversalSubtitles.org to generate a .srt file, then use that file to create closed captions for a DailyMotion.com video. After you create the captions, users will see the “CC” logo appear in the hover menu that appears in the top right corner of a DailyMotion.com video.
PAID SERVICES–
Use a competitively priced captioning service provider to get an untimed English language text transcript that can be uploaded to YouTube to generate accurate captions. Some have already been approved by YouTube and have the YouTube Ready seal of approval. Others have been approved by the Described and Captioned Media Program (dcmp.org) There are hundreds of captioning services in the United States and Canada, hungry for your business. And if you use one, you may be able to claim a tax credit for making your videos accessible to the hearing impaired! Visit HERE for more info on that.
HERE is a blog post from YouTube explaining about the YouTube Ready program. And HERE is a direct link to the list of YouTube Ready captioning vendors.
According to that blog post, the YouTube Ready vendors charge typically $2 a minute for just a transcript that you can upload to YouTube to generate accurate automatic captions, or $10 a minute for full, professional captioning work.
SUBTITLES–
If you do not mind open captions (subtitles) embedded into the video, there are plenty of free options online. But remember they’re embedded in your video. Use any of the several online free subtitling services such as SubtitleHorse.org, SubPly.com, UniversalSubtitles.org, or DotSub.com.
However, this option involves labor. Plus, creating accurate subtitles does require some skill.
CAPTIONING SOFTWARE–
Buy professional captioning software and do it yourself. This option involves more costs – software cost, labor cost.
MORE ON CAPTIONING YOURSELF–
We mentioned Video Critter earlier, which you can check out on the VideoCritter.org website
You can also use UniversalSubtitles.org to generate a .srt file, then use that file to create closed captions for a DailyMotion.com video.
If you do it yourself, Jamie recommends you check out some guidelines that are available online:
1) Caption It Yourself (said to be the best guide by many)
2) Providing Captions for Flash-Based Streaming Video (PDF)
3) Captioning Key, which also includes a downloadable PDF
YouTube’s Help Center also has information on adding captions/subtitles HERE.
You can upload .txt files to YouTube as transcripts. For caption files, according to the “Preparing a Caption File” section on YouTube Ready, YouTube supports both SubViewer (.SUB) and SubRip (.SRT) files. There are a number of free sites online, such as UniversalSubtitles.org, that you can use to generate a .SRT file to upload to YouTube. Note: If there is a problem with .SRT from UniversalSubtitles, try the .SBV format. A web series producer captioning for the first time found the timing was off with .SRT on YouTube, but timing was right with .SBV on YouTube.
For more info, head over to Guide to Deafness at DEAFNESS.about.com.
