Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, welcome to the third in my series of videos focusing on captions on YouTube and their importance in celebration of International Week of the Deaf. In the first video I went through what captions are and why they're actually useful. The second video was a quick breakdown of how to add captions to YouTube videos and tomorrow's video will give you a bit more insight into these symbols and what they mean. Today though, let's go through some frequently asked questions about captions. I ask your questions about captions in my Instagram and Twitter, you can follow me on those if you don't already, and I've done my best to answer them. But if you have any more questions, please do leave them in the comments down below. And now, on to what you should and shouldn't be including in your captions. Firstly though, a few misconceptions about who is actually using the captions. Currently, people watch YouTube videos with captions more than 15 million times a day and the number of videos with them on YouTube is 1 billion. A study on television accessibility by Ofcom found that 80% of the people who use closed captions are neither deaf nor hard of hearing, but they might be watching in a loud environment. Just trying to watch without distracting others. Using really faulty audio speakers. Struggling with the inconsistent volume of this video. Watching in a foreign language. Watching a really sensitive subject matter in public. Trying to save battery consumption. Taking notes from educational videos. While the remaining 20% are people who do have some degree of hearing loss and are thus the most important customer for your closed captions because they need them, it does go to show that the demand for closed captions isn't just limited to one certain group of people, and it's especially not one small group of people. Okay, but we already went through that in video one. There are more deaf people than you think, so... But Jessica, come on now. Films, television, YouTube videos, they're all visual. Is the audio really that important? Okay, you try watching everything without sound. Let me know how it goes. Picture your favourite TV show. Yes, my favourite is Buffy Vampire Slayer. Yes, I know it ended 15 years ago. No, I don't care. I'm dying love. Try to envisage just how many types of audio there can be in one scene. You've got your on-screen dialogue. That's characters talking on screen and you can see them. Then you've got your off-screen dialogue. That's cameras who are talking from out of the frame or an erasure or voiceover. I'm thinking Gossip Girl. Third, we have on-screen action sounds. This can be steps that you see being taken. It can be swords clashing together in a battle. It can be a glass falling and smashing on the floor. Anything you can actually see happen. Then off-screen action sounds. This is someone coming in through the front door downstairs or a zombie you thought was dead lying behind her and it's not because it's groaning. Five, background noise. This could be traffic, other people talking in the cafeteria, an entire army of slayers doing battle with vampires. Oh, spoiler. Is it still a spoiler if it's 15 years old? Next, in-story media. This is a television that's playing, a radio that's on in the background. This is stuff that the characters can actually hear themselves. Music soundtrack. Oh, I cannot raise this finger with this one. All right. Music soundtrack. This is music that is laid over in post-production. This is music only the viewer can hear, the character cannot. It's called the non-diegetic view. Filmmaking buffs. Number eight, additional effects. Again, this is later in post-production. This would be something like a vampire going poof. Closed captions are important because they help to describe every sound and audio cue that plays a part in the story itself. In the wider whole, it builds the narrative up. So without many of the things that I just mentioned, you would be missing out on a wide range of cues that are used to build a story. It's not just the language, the spoken words that are important. Convinced you need to use captions yet? Wonderful. I explained in video one about the difference between subtitles and closed captions, so I'm going to move straight on to the next most asked question, which is, what is the difference between open captions and closed captions? Open captions are those already embedded in the video file that you as a viewer have no control over. Think, for instance, when Netflix does automatic translations into English of characters who are speaking in Spanish and they put that on the screen, like parts of Orange is the New Black. Or when you go and see the cinema and it's a caption screening, there are all the subtitles at the bottom. You can't turn them on and off yourself as a viewer. Closed captions are those that are hidden until turned on. These are the type that you get in most television sets. And look. Down there. Down to the nitty gritty. What should and shouldn't you include in your YouTube captions? Just to say, I do not have a degree in captions, obviously. I have a degree in film studies. It's mildly useful in my job. It's actually pretty useful in my job. Also, I am just one deaf person. We all have very different views and experiences. I'm sure there are some in the comments section down below that are completely different from mine, and that's great because I welcome different people's different views. What if I make a grammatical error? Should I include that in my captions? Good question. It may feel like correcting yourself is, of course, the most sensible thing to do and easier for the viewer. But what you're forgetting is that YouTube is about personalities. You're being honest and open with the viewer, and that is what they're responding to. You're hearing viewers are able to experience the authentic sound of you. Perhaps you have an amazingly Yorkshire accent and say, Silly later, at the end of all of your videos. Don't correct that to see you later. How dull. However, it is completely unnecessary to keep in all of your ums and uhs and mhs or likes, unless you're using them for punctuation. They can slow the reader down when they're faced with an onslaught of rapid dialogue and captions appearing too quickly on the screen. You can cut out those unnecessary words, but don't ever change the meaning of what you're saying or show, if you're comically hesitating, that it needs to be in your subtitles as well for a reason. How do I add line breaks to captions on YouTube? YouTube, semi-annoyingly, doesn't allow you to actually include a line break when you're transcribing your words in the create captions section. Go back to video two if you're confused. This can be really frustrating when you want to transcribe two people who are on screen at the same time, but differentiate what they're saying. The best option is to write your caption out elsewhere and then copy and paste, maybe in the notes section on your computer or a Word document, something like that. How do I ensure that my deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers can enjoy watching my videos just as much as my hearing viewers? Boom. This is called equal access. It requires that the meaning and the intention of the material is entirely and completely preserved. That's everything from making sure that you caption the sound effects and dialogue to being true to accents and including some grammatical errors. Try to convey exactly what is being communicated. Again, though, do be aware of not throwing up too many words on screen. Ah, because it's just going to get confusing and scary for the viewer. It's okay to edit dialogue to be shorter and simpler, but you cannot change any of the meaning or skip things. Do I caption swear words and inflammatory language? This is actually far trickier than it first appears. On the one hand, yes, you definitely need to let deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers know that you are swearing. Do not infantilize them and do not think they are stupid. On the other hand, it's coming for you. If you bleeped or partially muted the swear word in your audio, do the same in your captions. I'll be talking a little more in the fourth video in the series about words that you could use in the place of swear words. But if you are very happy to risk angering the algorithm, then please go right ahead and do bandy your curses around. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Be true to yourself. And speaking of being true to yourself, to stop my videos from getting demonetized when I talk about my sexuality, I've taken the word out of my title, tags, and description. Should I also take it out of any captions I make? If you are one of those people who gets in trouble with the algorithm largely for LGBTQ plus things, then please do not stop talking about it. It's very important you do that. Do not stop talking about it. But also don't stop making your videos accessible. Consider instead using a mix of closed and open captions. If you have a sentence that's a little risque, then embed it in the video itself using open captions in the editing stage. And then you can closed caption the rest of your video so that someone who needs to use the captions and searches for videos can then filter, still find your video because it has closed captions, but also get what that is you're trying to say. And then hopefully the algorithm will not come for you. If, again, if it's coming for you anyway, you do you. Throw all the words you want in there. Should I caption all background noise? Since we're dealing specifically with YouTube rather than scripted television where every single audio thing you hear is there purposefully, I would say yes and no. Only put in background noise that you interact with or respond to. If a phone is ringing in the next room and you don't respond to it or notice it until afterwards when you're editing and then the video goes up, there's no need to put in your captions phone ringing in other room. It's just not necessary. It's not part of the dialogue. It's not part of the narrative. But if there is a lawnmower going outside of your bedroom window and you pause every two minutes to get comically annoyed about the lawnmower, then yes, add in lawnmower and lawnmower continues and lawnmower won't shut up, which again brings us to... Can I put jokes in my captions? Right, this obviously isn't about directly transcribing a joke that you have made. This is about whether or not it is okay to make jokes that exist entirely within the captions. Tricky. On the one hand, as I mentioned in video two, I find it incredibly frustrating when someone thinks it's hilarious to go in and fiddle with the captions in an amusing way that actually makes the video completely inaccessible for those of us who are deaf or hard of hearing. On the other hand, if you want to... (*coughing*) Then yeah, go right ahead. I think that's okay because it's probably an exaggerated description of an amusing, auditory situation. As long as you're not holding certain viewers back from understanding the text as a whole, then it is fine to joke, especially if it's something just for viewers who need to read. Like, um, um, um, um, um, like, uh, like, um, like, um, like. That's just my opinion though. Other deaf and hard of hearing people, please do leave your own thoughts in the comments down below. Should I caption the cover songs I make, especially since using lyrics might be a copyright problem? Okay, if you've already been given the okay by the holder of the copyright to cover that song or use a clip of it in your video, then just go and ask them if you can also have the okay in text form. If you haven't and your cover hasn't yet been picked up by the algorithm as being a cover, i.e. no one has tried to take the profits of the AdSense from you yet, then yes, you might want to be a little wary. Potentially unpopular opinion here, but there are websites and other videos that have lyrics of the most famous songs there are and also really small songs that no one knows at all. I don't think you have to caption those videos. If you've written your own original song, then yes, please do caption it. That's really important because, I mean, firstly, it's not only deaf people who use captions and secondly, deaf people can enjoy music too. Shocker. Can I alter the position of my captions? Yes, you can. As a viewer, you can take the captions that are down here, click on them, and drag them somewhere else. I don't know if that's possible on phone, but you definitely can on a computer, so... Try it. Try it now. I'll wait. You can also change the look of the captions by just hitting the little settings bar, dial thing, down there. Go to subtitles slash cc and in there, click on options and it will give you a whole load of different things about the colours and the fonts and what you want the background colour to be and how opaque you want it to be. All that good stuff. Really good, especially if you are dyslexic and prefer reading in one colour over the other. As a creator, however, you can create an SCC file off-site which will include things like positioning, information, and placement and then you can upload it to the video through the uploader file that I told you all about in video two. Should I include words that are already on screen, edited into the video? Well, maybe. If it's a title card like this one, hello, please don't copy me in captions, then no. If it's just one word, then yes. Obviously, it will be confusing for anyone reading. What do I do if two people are speaking over each other? That is a challenge, granted. The best thing to do is a hyphen followed by the dialogue, one line on top of the other. I'll be talking more about this and other symbols that you can use in the next video which will be linked in the description down below once it is actually uploaded. It should be up in two days' time. Now back to the studio. I hope that's answered some of your questions about captions and you're now even more incentivised to make sure you have them in all of your videos and push to make sure your favourite creators are using them too. If you have more questions, please do leave them in the comments below. If you're new here and you've enjoyed this video, found it entertaining, please do subscribe. Come, take a look around my channel. It would be lovely to have you. See you in the next video.