Recently, the National Association of the Deaf sued Harvard and MIT for discrimination by failing to caption the vast array of online content. This brings to mind, the YouTube videos A&M-Commerce provides for our university community that may not be captioned. According to one study in the U.K., up to 80% of viewers using captions are not considered Deaf or hard of hearing.  

Is your video closed captioned? Have you wondered why it is important to add closed captions to videos? The simple and short answer is because it’s the right thing to do. If you don’t, you’re excluding many people who have hearing impairments from understanding the content of your video.

About one in six people in U.S. have some form of hearing loss – that’s about 10 million people. Do you really want to exclude, and possibly attract potential students? What’s more, did you know that websites with videos will generally do better in Google searches than those without, and Google also ranks videos with captions higher.

Trying to reach an international audience? Most videos are available to an international audience. One out of four of the world’s population speaks English to some level of competence. Reading a language is usually easier than understanding someone speaking it, especially as a lot of videos don’t have great quality audio tracks. Adding captions is therefore going to help all those viewers for whom English isn’t their first language. If you want, you can even go one step further and add caption tracks in different languages.

Want to learn how to How to add closed captions to your content and How to upload Videos?

It’s pretty easy to add timed captions these days. If you have a transcript, you can upload this to YouTube and it will work out the timings for you – you might need to do a little tweaking.

If you’re not putting your video on YouTube, you can still create the timed captions file on YouTube and then download it as a .srt file which you can use on other hosting solutions or within your video player.

If you don’t have a script, you can use YouTube’s voice to text technology to provide you with a fairly crude version of what’s being said, then quickly edit this and use it with your videos.

You can use the basic instructions provided. YouTube’s made it much easier to add captions. You can either edit the automatic captions that YouTube creates, or upload a transcript and let You Tube match the timing.

Here’s where a lot of people go wrong

Whether you like it or not, YouTube creates automated voice-to-text captions and makes these available to watchers. Inevitably, there are a lot of mistakes and many of them are quite funny. 

According to YouTube 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and over a billion unique users visit YouTube each month. There are, of course, also other videos which are hosted elsewhere.

My hope, is that more and more video producers will spend that little extra bit of time needed to add captions, and make their work more accessible to a larger audience.

Lydia Harkey
EIR Accessibility Officer