Some suggestions for approaching captions: Don’t blindly auto-caption. If you rely on YouTube auto-captioning, you should invest a small amount of time in learning to use YouTube's caption editor to review and correct your captions. Bad captions are worse than useless and terrible for your image.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734705?hl=en I personally find YouTube's caption tools clumsy and do not use them. YouTube captioning does not meet my standards. Whether it meets some standard of “minimal” compliance is a subject of heated debate, but they don’t properly represent my company or my clients. The point is that captions represent you. The issue is not simply “compliance.” Try watching your auto-captioned programs with the sound off. Are they helping, or are they just a distraction? Keep in mind that many people with perfectly good hearing turn on captioning. My wife turns on captions when the baby is sleeping for instance. People for whom English is a second language turn on captions. And people on the subway, because they forgot headphones, or just because it’s noisy. So, better ideas, in ascending order of quality-cost-effort: I use a variety of services for transcription and captioning depending on need, but the cheapest is www.temi.com (about ten cents a minute) which provides very cheap automated transcription along with a powerful and easy to use cloud based editing and sharing solution. It’s great when the audio is clear and straight-forward. The transcript is cheap, and if the audio is good, editing is simple. This works fine for simple programs with one or two voices at a time: presentations, interviews, narrated programs. When the program audio is more complex or the audio is poor or the subjects have accents or their are multiple languages, you need a human. For inexpensive human transcription, there’s Rev.com and similar online services (about $1 per minute) which replace computers with humans, but are otherwise quite similar. I suspect many are actually the same company behind different front ends. Rev.com does NOT replace a dedicated captioning service, but it does add humans to the mix. These services are accurate, but they are not captioning experts and don't combine your captions with video for you. Real, proper captioning is not transcription. It is an art. If you want to understand the difference, and why it matters, start here. https://www.captioningkey.org/quality_captioning.html You can do captions yourself. I’ve trained many interns to caption. It takes a few days to train someone with decent grammar skills to handle basic captions, and I always review and edit them. I prefer an application called Inqscribe, available for both Mac and PC, but not particularly cheap and arguably not the easiest. This is predominately a transcription tool (an excellent one) but it can be used for captions even if the transcript comes from elsewhere. There’s also Jubler, which is free and a dedicated captioning program. If Jubler had existed when I started, it might be my preferred tool. And don’t discount full service companies just because they cost money. They are, on balance, pretty cheap, all things considered. Remember, time is money and they work MUCH faster than you can. Good captions are like any good writing, both a skill and an art, and expertise matters. I notice good captioning and I must assume I am not alone. Just last week I commented to my wife (baby asleep, captions on) that a program had exceptional captions and I wished I could find out who did them. Cheers, tod _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l@mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/mcn-l@mcn.edu/
