Closed Captioning

General Captioning Info

Captioning is text that displays on the screen during a video. Videos must be captioned for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing to understand the information contained in sounds and dialogue. Captioning should be synchronized with the dialogue, and include sound and video action to convey the full meaning of a video.

You can watch this video to see how to caption your YTube videos, or you can follow any of the three ways below:

1. If you're posting a video that was a recording from Zoom and you have live transcripts turned on in your account, your downloaded files will include a VTT file. This can be uploaded to YTube under the Subtitles option from the editing screen. You'll select that you want to "Upload a File" and select "with timings." YTube then uploads and matches the file.

If you read your video from a transcript, you can upload without timings by saving your transcirpt as an SRT file. Then go through the upload process described above, but choose "without timings."

2. If you don't have a live transcript, YTube will attempt to make its own captions. Often it takes a few hours after upload to actually see these - so you'll have to leave the video and check back later in some cases.

3. And finally, if you don't have a transcript file and YTube didn't recognize the words spoken on the video enough to create automatic captions, you'll have to type them in by hand. Keep in mind that it can take 5-10 times the length of the video to actually type in the captions.

• When typing in your content, you can pause and then start the video at any time by pressing SHIFT + Space Bar.

• Once you're done typing, you select that you want to "set timings" and the YTube matches what you've typed to it's place in the video.

It's also important to note that Google's closed captioning guidance is pretty good as well.

And wondering aobut closed captioning and Camtasia? TechSmith gives really good guidance on how to make and export them in Camtasia, as well as how they should look and function.