Speaker 1: Hey there, welcome back to my series eLearning Accessibility Tips and Tricks. Let's take a look at closed captions, which are essential for learners of all stripes. Now let's start with the difference between closed captions and subtitles. Closed captions are for people with hearing disabilities or for people that need to be able to understand what's going on on screen because they can't hear it for whatever reason. Like say you've got a screaming baby in the background. Subtitles are for people that don't understand the language. It may be for people that are learning the language or if you're ever watching a foreign movie that isn't in language you don't speak, you would turn on the subtitles. Technically, those are subtitles, not closed captions. Subtitles just include the words that are being spoken, whereas closed captions will also include notations about other sounds that are happening, whether it's music or sound effects, small things like that. There's also a difference between closed captions and open captions. Yes, open captions are a thing. Closed captions can be turned on and off by the user. So if the user is watching something on screen, they can choose to have them on, they can choose to turn them off. Whereas open captions are burnt into the video. They cannot be turned off. Those are the ones you see at the bottom of the screen, you can't turn them on, you can't turn them off. They can be very distracting, potentially, for users that don't want to see them. Closed captions, in general, offer better usability and accommodate user preference because you can choose whether to turn them on or off. However, if you're using a platform that doesn't allow for closed captions, it may be useful just to burn in open captions into your video because it is possible that open captions are better than no possibility of captions at all. It is good practice to add closed captions to all videos. Now, if you watch a lot of my videos, you might be saying, hey, Lindsay, I see the default captions but a lot of the time they're kind of poorly edited and yes, I am a bit of a hypocrite. I don't add closed captions that are perfect to all my videos because I just don't have the time and this is all my personal time and I'm not getting paid for it. But if you are doing work for a government agency or for K-12 or for higher education, it is important to add closed captions because that is required under Section 508 and if you are receiving government funding of some sort or serving some sort of public audience, you are likely legally mandated to add closed captions. So I do add closed captions to all of my teaching videos I use for my day job as a lecturer at a university. Personal stuff, I'm sorry. I let it slide a little bit. But it is ideal in general to give user control over closed captions. Just keep that in mind. If it's not something that the user can turn on or off, then they do in fact have open captions, not closed captions. All right. Now at this point you might be going, oh, this is great, but I don't have the ability to do closed captions. Well, I've got a shortcut, semi-shortcut for you. It still takes a bit of work. You can actually use YouTube to create closed captions for free. At least, you know, get enough of a base going and save yourself a little bit of time to create closed captions. What you can do is upload a video. You can just upload it as private. YouTube will automatically generate auto captions. And then you just have to go into the captions and fix the captions. Also, another option is if you do have a transcript for your video, you can upload your video and then upload your transcript and YouTube will automatically chop up your transcript to match the video. So that's pretty ideal. If you are someone that works from a transcript, you can just pop that in and it'll turn into closed captions for you. Again, if you are just uploading a video, it'll automatically create captions for you and it will add a transcript as well. And you can actually download the captions to use in other projects. Okay. So upload a video without anything. It'll create captions. You just have to fix them. If you upload a video and you have a transcript, you can upload that. It'll create captions. Anything with captions in YouTube will also have a transcript created as well, which is another feature that is often appreciated under section 508. Sorry. Let's do a quick demo of how this actually looks in YouTube. So I've got a couple of videos posted here. So for example, I've got a simple course tour that I did for one of the classes I teach as my day job as an instructional design instructor for a graduate program. I'm in the editing mode here in YouTube. You see the subtitles box here. YouTube refers to closed captions as subtitles. If you click on that, you'll see here the automatically generated captions that YouTube created. You'll see that they completely lack punctuation. Automatically generate closed captions as a technology are getting better and better. Some platforms do add punctuation now and you still have to double check and make sure it's correct. YouTube still doesn't, but it's not bad and you can see I talk pretty fast and it does pretty good at capturing what I say. So what I would do now is I would go through, add punctuation, capitalize things as needed. You need to get to a point where it's really understandable and makes sense for someone that is looking to use the closed captions. Once you do that, you would save, click done, and it'll convert them into true closed captions. I'll show you what that looks like here. I'm already pulled that up in this video. It's a self-introduction video. I didn't do a great job yet of editing these. Still kind of a work in progress here, but you can see it's chopped everything up now into a timestamped chunks and from here you can download the subtitles. Now this does download subtitles as an SBV format. That is not a standard closed caption format, so you will have to convert that and you can just do a quick search for something like SBV converter for closed captions and there's some free resources out there for you to be able to convert those really quick online without having to download any software. So results can be mixed as far as the amount of effort goes. It still takes me about a minute or two for maybe a couple minutes of video to be able to knock out the closed captions and make sure they're perfect, but it is a time saver to at least have something in place and not have to do it all from scratch. Once you're done with your captions, they're good to go. I mentioned earlier that YouTube will automatically create a transcript for you. Let's take a quick look at where that would be. So the transcript isn't very easy to find when you're looking at YouTube videos. You have to hunt it down. So this is the public page for YouTube. What you can do is click on the little three dots here and then show transcript. It'll pop up up here. You can toggle the timestamps on and off and if you want to copy this, you can just do a quick copy and you'll be able to download this or copy and paste it into a Microsoft Word file and then you can use that as your transcript for this video if you're in a some sort of learning context where you need to be able to provide a transcript. Alright, I hope this was helpful and you are able to get started adding closed captions to your own videos.