Captions in YouTube — try it!

7. March 2010 by Cape Cod Chapter HLAA Blog.

– Here’s some information from another HLA member about You Tube captions.  It’s a great start, though if you are NOT hearing impaired, you should look at Sandra Bullock’s Oscar acceptance speech to see why captioning by human beings is better than voice recognition captioning.  As Dana said, it can be funny, unless you really want to know what someone is saying.  –

As I hope most everyone knows, YouTube recently started providing
automatic transcription/captioning for all new videos uploaded to
YouTube.

I just did a search for a new video to doublecheck on how to make the
captions appear.  It turns out that there are a couple of steps to
take to turn the automatic captioning on for the first time, and that
merely seeing the “CC” with a red background on the bottom of the
video isn’t enough to see captions now.

For example, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtZLvFrl6qk&feature=aso

Click on the “CC” on the bottom part of the video and wait for the
menu to pop up.

Click on “Transcribe Audio (Beta)” at the top.  This turns on the automatic
transcription/captioning which is done for new videos. (Most older
videos won’t have that feature enabled yet.)

After activating the automatic captioning, one can then choose to change
the caption settings (the font and the size of the captions)  and
one’s account settings (if you don’t have an account on YouTube, it’s
helpful to set one up so you can set captioning preferences, save your
favorites, create playlists, etc.).  I just changed my YouTube account
settings so that automatic captioning is always activated.

The captioning is pretty cool!

Note that the automatic captioning will invariably have errors in it
if the owner of the video hasn’t corrected it. Some of the captioning
will probably be funny when it hasn’t been corrected yet.  <g>

Dana

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