Simple ways to caption videos: YouTube

I recently went to a training for technology leadership certification and one of the things we talked about for a great amount of time was accessibility for all students. 

I've decided I'm going to take a little bit of time to talk about captioning because that is one of the ways to make things accessible for students.  There are so many teachers flipping their classes, but do they realize that not all kids can follow the aural cues and watch the video along side?   Some of them need to have their videos captioned because they learn better by reading than merely listening. I want to take a little time today to show you how to use YouTube to caption.  I have found this is one of the easiest ways to make it work. 

1. First of all, if you have a video uploaded to YouTube, captioning is simple.  Follow these steps:

1. Open your YouTube video manager where you see the list of YouTube videos.

2. Choose the video you plan to edit and click Subtitles and caption from the Edit pull down menu.

2. 3. Choose English as the original language of the video and it will regenerate a page that has the 4th image on it, When you click the English that has a green dot next to it, you will see a page of text generate.  This is your captioning.   

4.  You need to click the edit button and it will permit you to change the text to what it needs to be.  Sometimes, text is generated that doesn't make perfect sense, but with a few keystrokes, you can change it to make it correct.  Hearing impaired will tell you they need to just get the gist and not the entire context.  Another note:  You may want to add cues that relate to the sounds as well. (applause, music, laughter) as this helps the hearing impaired understand why there is no captioning for a long period of time.

5.  Once you have edited the text that came in, you merely publish it and then you will notice that the video has text the next time it is played.

This is a free service and really doesn't take that long to complete.  You will be able to help many students who learn better from words than audio.  It is a great way to meet the accessibility needs of all students.

3. 

4. 

5. 

6.