Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to a short and informative guide on how to add captions to your YouTube videos. I'm Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, I am a deaf YouTuber who also watches way more YouTube than is probably healthy, so I really do know the importance of captions. This video is the second in a series about captions for International Week of the Deaf, and if you don't know why they're so important, then please do go back and watch the first video, where I explain how, without captions, you're kind of limiting the reach of your videos, and alienating potential subscribers. Not to mention that videos with closed captions or foreign language subtitles are ranked higher by the algorithm and have a better chance of being in the top searches. Tomorrow's video will answer questions about what to include in captions, and the fourth video in the series will break down the secret language of captions. How to caption. Firstly, we'll need to get to the captions section of the platform. Go to your video manager, click the drop-down menu next to the video you'd like to add captions to, select Subtitles CC, choose your language, and now you have one of three options. Upload a file. This is for those of you who've already created a captioned file off-site. These type of files contain both the text and the timecodes for when each line of text should be displayed. Some files also include position and style information, especially useful for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers. Bit of an extra step if you're just starting out, but it does mean that you can create one file and then reuse it on every platform where you upload the video. There are a number of websites that will allow you to create such a file. Transcribe and Autosync. Great for videos that already have a script or a voiceover. Simply copy and paste your script into the box, and once you're finished, click Set Timings. Take a few minutes as YouTube's voice recognition software automatically connects the written word to the spoken. Once they're ready, your new captions will be automatically published. You can then go in and edit them if the timing is a little off. This option is a great time-saver. Create new subtitles or CC. A little more labour-intensive, but great for blogs or other free-flowing formats. YouTube will give you auto-generated timing blocks which recognises their speech, although you can turn this option off. Type your content into each box, and if you need to adjust when the caption starts and ends, you can do so by dragging the borders under the video. A great thing about this option is you don't have time to finish the whole video. Your changes will be saved to the draft, and you can pick it up again later. When you're done, select Publish. No matter which option you choose, please remember to include not just spoken audio, but also sound cues such as music, or crowd noise, or wind blows portentously. Anything to help your hard-of-hearing viewers, or those watching in the library with the sound off when they should be doing something else. If making your own captions all sounds like way too much work, however, there is another option. Community captions. Community contributions allow one or more of your viewers to create closed captions for your videos, and also to provide translations. These are then submitted to be checked by the community, or you can do it yourself. You can edit these drafts, so if you get a few words wrong here or there, or spell a name incorrectly, it's a really easy fix. This is the way that I caption most of my videos. Aside from videos that are pre-planned and have a script, I would struggle to caption my own videos. Before your community can submit titles, descriptions, closed captions, or subtitles, you need to turn it on for selected videos, or make it the default setting for all videos on your channel. To turn community contributions on with one click, follow these steps. Go to your Creator Studio, select Translations and Transcriptions in the sidebar, click the Settings wheel, and select Turn on for all videos. There's also the ability to turn contributions on for specific videos. Next to Edit, click the drop-down menu and select Info & Settings. Under the video, click Advanced Settings, and then scroll down to where you can select Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions, and subtitles. Click Save Changes, and you are done. Once you have the same language captions on your videos, your audience can submit translations to help you reach a global audience. After the viewer has submitted their transcriptions and translations, YouTube will moderate it for spam or inappropriate content, although this doesn't always work. I was once desperately trying to find a news clip after a big event, and the only one that had captions was someone who replaced every noun with the word meow. Hilarious, but not helpful. Once it's passed YouTube's checks, you can manage it by reviewing, editing, publishing, flagging, or rejecting it. You can also allow your community to moderate the content, and it'll automatically be published when it gets enough reviews. Then we come to automatic captions. YouTube's automatic captions in the past weren't the best, and we have to thank activists like Rikki Poynter for her No More Captions campaign that motivated the platform to improve. Indeed, in the last year, auto-captions have definitely improved, and YouTube is slowly rolling out a new feature that will allow captions for live streams in English on certain channels with over 10,000 subscribers. It may not be available right now, or it may be, depending on when you're watching this video. It's easy to help auto-captions improve, though. All you have to do is edit them. Automatic captions are available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese. If automatic captions are available, they'll be automatically published on the video. Processing time depends on the complexity of the video's audio, though, so they might not be available for the first 24 hours after you've uploaded. You can then review them and check there are no silly mistakes that make you say something awful. Go to your video manager. Next to the video you want to add captions or subtitles to, click the drop-down menu next to the Edit button. Select Subtitles in CC. If automatic captions are available, you'll see Language Automatic in the Publish section to the right of the video. Review automatic captions and use the Edit or remove any parts that haven't been properly transcribed. Yes, it's really that easy. Currently, people watch videos with automatic captions more than 15 million times a day, and the number of videos with them is an astonishing 1 billion. Don't let your videos be left behind. Caption them. Or watch more of my videos about captions and allow me to sell them to you. Like a cheesy 1950s TV commercial. If you're left with more questions about how to do captions right, particularly the ins and outs of captioning best practice and rules and so on, then watch the next video in the series to find out more. Down there. And subscribe to more videos with captions. And me.