YouTube

So I just submitted this blog for a possible "unpaid social media internship." It sounds like I'd be getting to do the same stuff I always do, but I'd get to put on my resume that I did it for a company, albeit one that's just starting up. Anyway, here it is.

The day I discovered YouTube was a very unproductive day. Here were thousands of videos available to watch as I procrastinated on school projects and looked for things to entertain myself with. However, since that day, something had always frustrated me as a hard of hearing person. There were no captions available for most videos. The only time I saw words on the screen was when the audio consisted of a song playing in the background and the visuals consisted of the lyrics to the song. Don't get me wrong. That can be cool sometimes, but I've gotten frustrated with user-made videos in which people speak at a fast pace or mumble or have a funny accent. Unlike my friends who were born deaf or lost their hearing at a young age I'm not very good at lip reading and my mom always worries that I'm doing even more damage to my ears when I wear headphones with the volume turned up. Naturally, when I heard that YouTube was going to make it easy for users to add captions to their videos I got pretty excited. I'd been waiting for something like this to come along.

Then I realized- months after this announcement had been made- that hardly anyone was using this option. The little [cc] button was there for most videos, but 95% of the time rolling over it just gave me a message that read "captions are not available." Recently, I decided to investigate. I made a YouTube account and a short, 20 second video on my digital camera. Then I posted the video and researched how to add captions. I figured when YouTube said it was "easy" to add captions that it was a simple cut and paste sort of thing, the kind of mindless activity that allows any moron to post a blog. Apparently, I was wrong.

The first thing that was a bit annoying was that I had to "research" how to add the captions. It was not clearly explained on a main page on YouTube, though there were a few videos explaining the process, and it was easily found among “help” files on YouTube. With the help of my comp sci major boyfriend, I finally figured it out. You have to create a special "SRT" file that can be created in notepad. It involves numbering the captions in order and timing them within the video. It looks something like this:

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
(hr:min:sec to hr:min:sec)
Hello, everybody
Welcome to my video

Now, this was fairly easy to do for my entire 20 second clip. However, I can see how it might get tedious for a 5, 10 or 20 minute video. An entire movie would be extremely time consuming. Consider writing the file, uploading it to the video, playing the video, fixing the timing or wording accordingly in the SRT file, refreshing the page and going through that process over and over.

Google has come up with technology including voice recognition and automatic timing. However, the use of this new technology is limited. It's only available to some government channels and Google partners. Feel free to watch this interesting video about the need for captioning and the new technology that's being developed.

If you'd like help adding captions to your own YouTube video you can go to the YouTube help page .

I appreciate captions on videos that I watch even more now that I know how much work it actually is for most people to add them. However, being the lazy Web 2.0 user that I am, I can understand why most people don't bother. We're not all the type of pros who make fancy html web pages every day. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when Google perfects its captioning technology for mass use and all web content will be fully accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.