Description

Youtube has created a caption infrastructure. Every video on YouTube can potentially provide captioning. If you are a conscientious owner of a YouTube Channel and are committed to captioning all your videos, that’s great. That said, as you might imagine, some people and organizations who post videos to YouTube provide captions for their content. That is slowly changing as a combination of legislation and the growing awareness of the importance of inclusion take hold.

Assignment: Watch YouTube captioned content

In YouTube, type the word “captioned” into the search field.

You’ll get a list of entries. Browse through the videos and watch some of the videos.

Discussion: Captioned Content on YouTube and other portals

Using the discussion forum, share your discoveries with the course mentor, as well as other students who may be taking this course at the same time as you. You you familiar with captioned content on other web sites. Please share with your mentor and others who are taking the course.

Join the discussion here.

Automatic Captioning

While you could just caption your content by hand, YouTube has been exploring “automatic captioning” as a means getting more captioned content online. The automatic captioning feature is essentially a speech to text converter. It captures spoken words and attempt to convert what it hears into text.

Some YouTube videos provide an option to turn this feature on. You’ll find “automatic captions” under the “cc” or “Tools” option on the controller that resides below the YouTube video.

How well does it work? From a functional perspective, and at this time, not very well. Automatic captioning depends on the quality of the audio, the speaker’s voice, if there’s just one, or more speakers, and any background sounds and noises. A video with a single, well paced and articulate speaker may manage quite well. Otherwise, it’s a disaster. At this time, don’t think that you’re going to manage by relying on automatic captioning.

Captions should be easy to read and as accurate as possible. The best path to readable and accurate captioning is to manually caption the video. Fortunately, YouTube provides for manual captioning in two ways. Users who have access to a caption editor can upload caption files. However, if you are new to captioning and/or don’t have a caption editor, YouTube provides you with an online editor. We’ll learn how to use YouTube’s online editor later in this module.

Two examples of YouTube automatic captioning

In the following image, an animated character introduces herself and her company. She tells us her name and the name of her organization.

The captions provide an “automatic caption option. If you turn this on, when you play the video, the captions convert the spoken words to:

my name is constant sex and I’m with

excessive billy ontario

While this sort of thing is great for comic relief, it’s useless for anyone who needs captions.

The next image is from a short clip from Woody Allen’s movie, Annie Hall, that was uploaded to YouTube. It too provides an automatic caption option.

The caption inside the video is the automatic caption, while the caption under the video is what is actually being said.

The automatic caption reads:

I don’t think from I mean part of the norm

and for that reason

Woody is actually saying:

I’m comparatively normal

for a guy raised in Brooklyn.

Watch the Woody Allen Clip from Annie Hall

Assignment: Caption Fail Videos On YouTube

In YouTube, do a search for “caption fail Rhett and Link”. Rhett and Link produce a series of videos, that explores what it would sound like if people spoke the way they were automatically captioned.

Discussion Forum: Caption Accuracy

Using the discussion forum, share your discoveries and impressions about automatic captioning, caption accuracy, and anything related with the course mentor, as well as other students who may be taking this course at the same time as you.

Join the discussion here, ensuring that the "Is this for an assignment?" dropdown is set to the name of this lesson.

Continue to Module 3 - Form and Structure of Captions »