YouTube changed how creators add captions and descriptive audio to videos. The old “Subtitles” tab is gone. Now you’ll find everything under “Languages” in YouTube Studio. This post shows where to find the new tools, how to use them, and why they matter for accessibility. It also explains how these changes affect your workflow and what to do to keep your content inclusive and easy to understand.
Here’s a round-up of short captioned topics and tips. These used to be in the giant captioned video guide. But it was becoming unwieldy and I wanted to take out instructions for software as that’s always changing. I also separated out the Captioning Videos FAQ. Captions Revealing Secrets Should captions reveal secrets? Sometimes the speaker … Read more
Do you buy DVD or Blu-rays anymore? They still have one thing you typically can’t get watching videos on-demand, online, or a streaming network. The special features. The bonuses. The something extra. However, when I check out the extras, I keep my expectations low. It’s because a lot of them don’t have captions. Something I … Read more
My son is a high school senior. [Pause for dramatic effect.] Of course, it makes this mama emotional. More so because Zachary is the youngest of three. Senior year. You know what that means. Yup. College application time. Time for Zachary to do marketing … himself. But the college process starts long before they’re seniors. … Read more
Someone tagged me in a post that contained a video showing how to caption with an app. As a caption pusher, it excited me. It takes a village to educate folks about why and how to caption videos. That and to spread the word to follow and use #Captioned when posting captioned videos. #Captioned is … Read more
If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s this: prepare for the unexpected. No company can think of every possible scenario that will happen. One of the first things to do is to create a process. There’s always going to be a need for a process or making a change to one. And believe … Read more
We have a new problem with videos. It’s a good problem to have. With more do-it-yourself captioning apps on the market, more people are captioning their videos. However, the options they select for their captions don’t always follow best practices and affect the user experience. When you watch captions for decades, you learn what works … Read more
YouTube is a great option because it’s free and you can download the caption text file to use with your video. You can import the caption text file into an app to burn in your captions for open captions. This tutorial assumes you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube. Now, which option do you want to … Read more
Using black for the font color in content is boring for a good reason. But first, a kayaking story. After kayaking for two hours, you can bet my friends and I were famished. We were a short drive away from Keller’s Drive-In. It’s a Dallas institution. The old-school place looks like a scene from “American … Read more
Yes, social media has its own shortcuts like keyboard shortcuts. These are things you can learn once and use everywhere. I love to learn new keyboard shortcuts. Without a doubt, they speed typing. Back in the early ’90s, I learned my first shortcuts: Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V aka cut, copy and paste. And they still … Read more