Creating Captions

As with creating transcripts, there are 3 ways to create captions: typing by hand, using speech recognition, or outsourcing. It is also important to follow the quality captioning guidelines, regardless of how captions are created.

While it’s sufficient to provide verbatim HTML transcripts for podcasts, videos need to have BOTH verbatim captions and HTML transcripts. The example of a video has both captions and an HTML transcript.

Captions on YouTube videos can be viewed on any devices (computers, phones, tablets). However, it is important to note that YouTube auto captioning has accuracy problems because it is generated by a machine. Auto captions are not a “final” product and cannot be fully automatic.

The video below shows a example of how auto captions look if not edited by humans.

So YouTube captions need to be edited by video owners to clean up errors and follow styling guidelines by adding proper punctuation, speaker identification, sound description, etc. This can be done either manually or by replacing them with transcripts with timestamps from a professional vendor such as Casting Words.

Amara is another DIY tool that allows a user to caption and translate any video player that does not have captioning feature (including Vimeo videos). However, it is advised to use YouTube or other players with captioning feature because captions in players with the Amara “skin” cannot be viewed in browsers with JavaScript disabled and on mobile devices.

For long professional videos made by organizations with large budgets, it is strongly advised to outsource professional transcribers – such as “YouTube Ready” Qualified Captioning Vendors (recommended captioning services for online videos)