>>Melissa: All right, it's just after four o'clock central, so I'll go ahead and get us started. I'll first do that by pasting a link to today's slides in the chat if you would like to access those during the session. Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to another Toolkit Tuesday. I'm Melissa. I'm an IAAP-certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies and a member of Knowbility Accessibility Services team. The Toolkit Tuesday webinar series is one of Knowbility K-12 digital accessibility initiatives and offers tips to create inclusive accessible learning environments for students of all abilities, including students with disabilities. Topics range from assistive technology trends in classrooms, student advocacy, and building a collaborative ecosystem and infrastructure. The topic of today's session is using YouTube for captions and transcripts, ensuring all videos have accurate captions and transcripts is key to making content accessible for all students to access and learn.
During today's session, my colleague Jay will show you how to use YouTube to generate and edit captions for your videos as well as create transcripts. Jay McKay will present via a prerecorded video. While I'm here to answer questions. You're welcome to answer questions via chat as they come up. I'll also ask for questions and reactions at a couple of good stopping points. And you are then welcome to raise your hand and speak over the mic.
As I mentioned, we do have some slides for you today. They are available through a bit.ly link. I have placed that link in the chat. I'll do that again just in case anyone has come aboard. Oh, I see a message noting that some folks may have difficulty accessing the slides. Perhaps one of my colleagues can attempt to attend to that while I'm presenting, but if we're not able to do that live during the session, we will take a look following the session. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. The link for the slides is bit.ly, BIT. L_Y/ Feb Toolkit 2023 slides. Feb Toolkit, 2023 slides, and each of those words in the latter half of the URL is capitalized. It's in Camel case, so that's a capital F, a capital T, and a capital S. And again, if there is an access issue, we'll take a look at that as soon as we are able. Let's go ahead and get started.
So for those of you new to Knowbility, welcome. Knowbility is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure equal access to technology for people with disabilities. We are based out of Austin, Texas, but we work around the globe. And one of the ways that we do this is through our community programs. That includes today's program, our Toolkit Tuesdays, which is part of our K-12 Access Toolkit. That offers resources and events that support teachers, administrators, students, and parents looking to build inclusive classrooms with accessibility in mind for all students. We also have Be A Digital Ally, our monthly webinar series where we talk about best practices in accessible design. BADA, B-A-D-A, as we sometimes call it, is designed for any type of content creator whether your level of expertise is a volunteer who is running your community group's Facebook page or you are an experienced web developer now exploring web accessibility, there will be a BADA for you.
We also have our annual AccessU conference where tech professionals, content creators, policymakers, and advocates come together to talk about technology and inclusive digital design. This year's event is a hybrid one taking place in Austin, Texas as well as online via Zoom and our learning center, and it takes place from May 9th through the 12th. Tickets are on sale now for what will be, I think, four wonderful days of just good, hands-on, in-depth learning with peers and experts from around the world on good accessible digital design and technologies.
And then of course we have our Accessibility Internet Rally or AIR. This is our annual website competition where we pair development teams with nonprofit organizations to design accessible websites and apps in a practical hands-on setting. Company teams are trained and mentored while they build a basic website for a nonprofit organization or artist. One of the ways you can support Knowbility in our mission is through our donate page, and that is Knowbility.org/donate, Knowbility.org/donate. We appreciate your generosity.
Now I'll turn things over to Jay. As I mentioned before, Jay is presenting virtually via recorded video. Note that automatic captions are available via your Zoom controls. You are welcome to ask questions via chat as they come to you. As I stated before, I'll also pause at a couple of points to check for understanding a couple of times and that will be an opportunity to raise your hand and speak over the mic if you prefer. With that being said, give me just one moment and I will transition us to Jay.
>>Jay McKay: Hi everyone, it's me, Jay. Before we get started, I just want to go over our agenda and what we're going to be covering today. First of course we're going to talk about why you want to make sure that you're captioning your videos and how it's beneficial to our students. Then next I'm going to walk you through how to utilize YouTube in generating those. We'll look at the auto-generated captions and how you can edit those, how you can create captions or subtitles in additional languages. And then I'm also going to walk you through how to create a transcript file in addition to some other tips and tricks along the way.
First thing, we want to talk about why captions are important. As we know captions are going to be necessary for some of our students, but really beneficial for all of them. Of course, we know that students who are deaf or hard of hearing are going to need access to captions because that's how they're going to perceive auditory input. If we're playing a video, they're not going to know what's being talked about or said or happening on that video auditorily without that text support. It also helps students with processing disorders or learning disabilities.
Again, having that additional input when they're watching that media can help them with processing and better understanding. Also helps non-native speakers, so if they're watching something in a different language than what their native language is, again, provides some assistance in better understanding what's going on comprehension. And then lastly, it really does improve comprehension for all who are watching with captions. There's several studies that are showing how it's assisting students not only with decoding skills, but also with better retention of information, recalling that information from video right after watching it, et cetera. At the end of the presentation today, we will have some resources and those will include a few sources that will link you to that data.
Just for the sake of time, I'm not going to go really deep into what captions are, what transcripts are, really looking at in terms of the accessibility guidelines of it. I do recommend that you check out our Be A Digital Ally session called Video Captioning. We really do dig into talking about the different types of captions and how to make sure you're formatting your captions properly. All of that is covered in that session. So please, please visit. It's going to be Knowbility.org/digitalally, and then when you get to that page, you're going to see all our previous sessions and you're looking for the one on video captioning.
Before we get started, just a couple of reminders so that way we know what we're all getting into in our journey of captioning with YouTube. First off, you will need to have a Google/ YouTube account. That's just the way it works. I know some people are like, oh, I hate having those accounts. I understand, but if you want to utilize that tool, you're going to need to have the account. I will also note it does take some time depending on the length of your videos, but it is a free tool, and also I've found that as I utilize it more, I always find my own shortcuts and workarounds so that way I'm really utilizing that tool to the best of its ability. But just want to heads-up, it might feel like it's taking forever the first time you do it.
I did put the link for the Google support page about how to add captions to YouTube videos. I find this to be a very helpful resource, especially if I see a weird error message or if I need to troubleshoot something. I find it does a fairly good job of walking me through steps as well as what could potentially be wrong. Before we get started, I do want to again kind of provide a heads-up. This demonstration is going to assume that you already know how to upload videos and that you have a basic use of YouTube. I'm not going to walk through, this is what the visibility settings mean, this is how to create a title card. I'm not really going to do any of that. This is more for people that maybe you're uploading things to YouTube but you're not utilizing that ability to create captions through YouTube. So that's really what I'm focusing on today and making sure people know how to utilize those tools. So let's get started.
Before we do, I'm just going to note some tips and tricks and I will bring them up again as I go through the demonstration, but I'm just going to kind of lay them out at the beginning as well. If possible, have a script. If you are creating videos for your students, maybe it's to review an assignment or you're going over content that they need to preview before coming back to class the next day, whatever that content is. If you have a script, it's really great to read from that. One, it helps keep you as the presenter focused and on track, but then also with that script, you can use that to help generate captions much faster. And I'll show you what I mean by that in a little bit. But instead of just waiting for YouTube to auto-generate, you can actually use that script as the starting base for it to generate captions from.
Next, I want to talk about purchasing transcript or captioning services. If you happen to have the opportunity to purchase those services instead of having to generate your own, I just want you to be aware of a couple of things. One is to check how they're doing their pricing in terms of their services. Most that I've run into, they will have it where you purchase one or the other and it's not coming as a package deal. Usually what'll happen is let's say I buy the captions and then they'll say, "Oh, would you also like a transcript file?" Or vice versa. For myself personally, if I'm feeling frugal, which I usually am, I find it's better for me to purchase the transcript file and then I can use that file to generate the captions using YouTube, and then that way I have a nice pretty transcript file that I'm not having to do a lot of formatting with.
And then YouTube is really going to do a good job of putting that very edited transcript file and timing it fairly accurately so I'm not having to do a lot of editing caption wise. Just food for thought on that one. And then we're going to talk later about using YouTube to auto-generate subtitles in a different language. You really have to make sure your native captions are accurate. If you try to use it with the auto-generated it's going to cause you some problems. You always want to make sure your native captions are accurate first. And then also, I recommend, again, not relying on auto translate, but if you have somebody available that can verify that that translation is good, and I'll show you what I mean by having them edit that transcript as they're watching the video. But definitely captions need to be accurate first and then if possible, have someone that can verify that the translation is accurate as well. Here we are in the YouTube studio. I've already logged in. I've uploaded my videos, so I see them in the channel content area.
I recognize that this is me, I'm in my account. On the left side of the screen, I have some choices in terms of dashboard content, et cetera. Right now I'm under that content and then I see my two videos. I'm going to click on the first one that says Amazing Assignment. I'm just going to click on it and it lets me see my video details. I have my title, et cetera. Now over to the left side of the screen, I will see again some choices, and I'm going to go to where it says subtitles. There you go. And here, because I've already uploaded my video, I have two choices. Now, when you upload your video, you may not initially see the automatic captions generate, but they will eventually be there, especially if you upload a larger video over an hour.
It may take a couple of hours for those automatic captions to generate, but they will be there. Here I have two subtitles or caption files. This first one says English automatic. That means that is the one that YouTube has generated by itself, playing the video through with its software. And then the second one says English United States Video Language. This is what they consider to be the original language of the video because I had the language setting set to English. Now whenever I'm posting content, it's assuming that all of my content is going to be posted in English. So it's saying this is the original video language.
Now you'll see for both of these, there's a couple of different options. So for the English Automatic, under subtitles, it's this published letting me know that it was also published automatic, and then I have an option to duplicate and edit. Now, for the one below it, that original language transcript or subtitle file, it has the option to add. What it's doing here is, ‘hey, if you want to create your captions, this is where you do it.’ But for now, I just want to show you how to edit the auto captions. Okay.
I'm going to click on that duplicate and edit, and the way it's going to load up, I have this pop-up screen that shows up on the left side of the screen. It looks like a big text box with all of my dialogue. On the right side of the screen, I see a little preview window of the video itself. And then underneath, you'll actually see what is essentially the text boxes, and then you'll also see how they are synced up to the audio track. You'll see little text boxes, and then you'll see the audio track. Now the next view I want to show you is where it says edit timings. On the left side where right now it shows it as a big text box, when I click edit timings, it's going to change the view.
Over on this side, now I can see the text with its timings. Okay, so instead of it being one big block of text, now I have little smaller boxes of text, and then over to the right, I see the timestamps that they're associated with. Now if I look back down at the bottom, you can see again that text box and then the audio that is associated with it. If you look, there's a little zoom out, zoom in. I'm going to zoom out a little bit because now I can see all of my text boxes and it's a little easier for me to get a clearer picture of where everything is.
As I mentioned before, it's auto-captioning. We're going to need to do some edits. The first thing I'm going to look at is to make sure I have capitalization and punctuation. I will say YouTube typically doesn't know things need to be capitalized unless it's probably a really common proper noun or can make some assumptions on that. But overall, if you want something capitalized, if you want punctuation, you are going to have to put it in. The other thing to note is when you are using auto-captions is it is going to pick up any vocal fillers, transitional phrases: so, ums, and ahs. I know sometimes when I start a next sentence or phrase, I might say, “all right”, or “okay,” as my way to transition into the next section. All of those things will get picked up.
Now when I create my captions, ultimately I'm looking for clarity and accuracy of content. Vocal fillers could be accurate, but is it really useful to the content? Not really. When I talk about accuracy, I'm looking to make sure it's lined up properly with where the speaker's talking and that it's the content that I want to be displayed in terms of this is what we're talking about. I want to make sure it's clear. So any vocal fillers, I'm going to get rid of those. I need to add punctuation and there we go.
So, as I've made my changes over here on the left side in that window preview on the right, I now see those changes have been made over there. As I'm watching the video or as I'm editing the video, I want to check to make sure, again, that the timings are fairly accurate, usually within a second of when the speaker is talking, right? Because you don't want it to come so far before or so far after that maybe what they're showing on the screen being discussed, et cetera.
“Hello everyone. It is Jay, your teacher. This video is to go over your next amazing assignment. So let's get started.” If you noticed my, "So let's get started," started a little late. It's not terrible. I could probably get away with it, but I'm going to go ahead and show you some ways that you can adjust those timings.
The first thing you can do is actually adjust it by typing in the actual timestamp of where you want the text to start. The way you can figure that out is by putting your cursor down across that audio timeline where I see my text in the audio. It's right here. This is where I need it to start. It's looking about 09:10 is where I would need it to be. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and type it in. I'm just going to put 09:10, and now it should shift the text to where I need it to be. Okay, now it's shifted it over.
[Listening to the recording, watching for the new alignment of caption “So let's get started.” The other thing I could do is actually put my cursor over that box, where the text box is, and when I put my cursor in the right spot, it's actually going to make my arrows point in the opposite directions. Then from there, I can actually click and drag that text box where I want it to be. It's pretty lined up. This is a fairly short video. It's not super complicated. Most of the transcript looks like it's going to line up fairly well, but sometimes you just kind of need to nudge things over a little bit, and that's a great easy way to do it without having to do a lot of fuss and muss.
Let me fix this next sentence. All right. And again, you just kind of got to go through and do the editing. Because this is a short video, it's only a minute, it's really not going to take me very long to get through. Anything, five, 10 minutes pretty quick to go in and edit, re-watch it and make sure everything is where you need it to be. I'm going to show you after this how to do some work for longer videos. I do a lot of videos that are over an hour long at least.
The next thing I want to show you is if you look at our text, I am keeping within the guidelines of two lines of captions on the screen at one time. However, you also want to make sure it's fairly readable for your viewers and so that they can take it in quickly, and that way they're not having to get too distracted by those captions, and they can take in the visual information as well in addition to those captions that you've created. Oh, it said ‘bottles’ instead of ‘models.’ I'm going to put ‘models of the globes,’ put that in there.
This probably could be two separate entries instead of just one big chunk for 10 seconds. There's a couple of ways you can do it. One way that I like to do it is I will take this block of text. It's highlighted blue, so I know that's the one I'm going to edit and I'm going to shift it. Oops, not you. I'm going to do some finagling and I'm going to move it around a little bit. Now get different pictures and bottles of globes. That's where I want it to stop. I like to shift that text over. Okay, give it some space because what I'm actually going to do is put my cursor where I want my next line of captioning to start. I'm going to hit enter, okay? And what it's actually done now is instead of one box of text, now I have two, and now I can just go and adjust my timing. I'm just clicking and dragging boxes around a little bit.
Okay, so let's check that. I think I've got it pretty well lined up. “Get different pictures and bottles of globes. We're going to label countries and rivers and oceans.” As you can see, sometimes you need to shift some things around a little bit, but again, if it's within a second or two, you're going to be fine. Please don't feel it has to be super, super, super right on milliseconds. If you feel like they're going to get the content and it's going to be accurate, you'll probably be fine. And if it's not, somebody will let you know. Okay. This is one way to edit your captions is to go through this timing scenario. Again, this is just a nice way to make sure that the timings line up.
Now, because it's such a short video, this is probably fine in terms of editing it this way because it's not really long. I'm not having to do a lot of heavy editing. If it was a longer piece of text, I might find it easier to edit as text. Back up at the top, I have edit as text. And here, it's showing me a slightly different format, rivers and oceans, different land masses on those globes. Then again, I can just go in here and type. Now, it may not change what's being displayed for me though as I'm typing because it doesn't see the text boxes like it did in the timings view. [inaudible] types of formats that are going to be acceptable. So as you see me typing, you notice that the view does not change on that video side on the right side. Okay. Here it's just if it's a little easier for me to see that text as a whole.
The other thing that I like to do is actually copy the text from here and I would copy and paste it into another document. This is a really nice way to do it if you have large amounts of text, because then you can do “find and replace” for your ums and ahs. You can “find and replace” if you know it's going to spell certain words wrong. You can kind of have a much easier time of doing that ‘text edit’, and then once you've edited the way you want it, you can always paste it back in here and hit publish. So with our movie magic, I have edited my captions so they look as accurate as I want them to look. Now, when I am watching my captions again, I can just start at the beginning and watch them. If you are doing a longer video, something like closer to an hour in length or more, some people just like to watch the beginning and the end of the video and just spot-check it that way.
When I have longer videos, I actually will watch the entire video, but I'm watching it at twice speed, and I might be doing some other things too. So it's still doing that spot-checking. But then as I'm listening to the video, if I think there might be a spot where the audio got a little wonky or maybe some editing happened, I know to maybe perk up and look at that screen specifically right there. So, the way you can watch it at double speed, is again looking at the video viewer, clicking on these settings gear, and then I can adjust the speed. Right now it says it's at normal, I'm going to go to two. I won't play very much, I promise. But now I can play it at twice speed and get a good visual of if my text is lining up with my audio.
“Hello everyone. It is Jay, your teacher. This video is to go over your next amazing assignment. So let's get started. So here's our topic. We're going to talk about the globe.”
Okay, so it's looked like it's lining up really nicely. You don't need to hear me continue to talk at twice speed. I talk fast enough as it is. So we're feeling good with this. We're going to go ahead and hit publish.
All right, now where I had two sets of video subtitles, I now have three. This is the new one that just got added. And as you can see, it's saying, you can add. Typically, what I find to be easiest is once I've edited my video is if I want to just use this set of captions, that's fine. It shouldn't cause any problems going down the road. It's just the way that YouTube generates these things. It's made this one as that United States video language. It tries to say this is the original language and everything else is a translation. It's not, but that's how it's reading it. But it's fine. You can leave it as is. Next, I want to show you how we can...
>>Melissa: All right, so before Jay goes on, I wanted to stop to address a couple of questions I've seen in the chat, as well as share some links that I think you'll find helpful. Jay showed us how to access and edit the automatic captions that are created when someone uploads a video to YouTube, emphasizing clarity and accuracy in the text and the timing that specifies when captions display. Jay briefly referenced something that I wondered myself when I started working with captions, and that is how long each caption frame should be. Should there be two lines of text? Should there be three lines of text? Is there a character limit as well as other captioning best practices? Can I change the appearance of the captions? Should I change the appearance of the captions? How do I caption music? How do I best indicate when there's a change in speakers?
If you haven't captioned before, some of those decisions can be challenging and you may not know the best course of action. I certainly didn't when I got started doing this. So I have found a really good resource created by Described and Captioned Media Program, DCMP. I have shared links to both their quick tip sheet and their more comprehensive captioning key resource in the chat. Captioning key is the first place I look whenever I have a question about how to caption something that I haven't captioned before. That sort of brings us to the topic that I've seen discussed in the chat, and that is styling the appearance of captions. So, I want to keep my answer brief so we can have time for the rest of Jay's presentation. But basically, there are two types of captions: open captions and closed captions. Open captions are sometimes described as being burned into a video, so they're always on. You as the viewer don't have the ability to toggle them on and off.
Closed captions, you can toggle them on and off. They can appear or not appear. When it comes to web accessibility, closed captions that the user has the ability to turn on and off are recommended, and that's for a lot of reasons. But the main one is that if you don't need captions, if captions don't help you learn and understand, sometimes they can be distracting, and we need to give users the ability to eliminate that distraction. Video editing programs such as Premiere Pro do give video creators the ability to create stylized captions. You can stylize things like the font, the size, and the location, encode those into the captions that are burned into the video, and have those choices reflected.
When it comes to closed captions, it's not quite as easy to dictate how the captions appear, and really that's for a good reason. It's because users are accessing these caption videos on their own devices with their own sort of learning needs, and we want to give them the ability to select the font, the placement, the size, and other factors that work best for them.
As a couple of folks mentioned in the chat, yes, there is the ability in YouTube to alter the appearance of captions, but really that's happening on the user side. The creator supplies the captions in a format that is agnostic of style, style agnostic. You provide the text and you provide the timing, but any styling is taken care of by the media player and the user adjusting their own preferences. I just provided a link to the YouTube help article that talks about the type of things that a user might change when they're accessing your content that is captioned. I'm also sharing another, I think, a fun article from 3Play Media, which is a captioning provider, a vendor that sells captioning services, that shares some fun captioning and subtitling hacks. A couple of those have to do with location and appearance of captions. I hope that's helpful in clarifying what types of things you can alter when you are in YouTube versus creating captions using a movie editing program.
Seeing a note that folks aren't seeing my links. Oh, no, I think I shared the last few directly to my coworker who I had messaged earlier in the session. So sorry. I'm really glad that you mentioned that in the fonts. In the font... In the chat. Let me share them again quickly and then we'll return to the presentation. So that's the captioning key resources. And then we have Google's support article on how to alter the font, color, opacity, and size of captions, as well as some additional tips and tricks from 3Play Media. Then next up, Jay will be talking about translation.
>>Jay: Use YouTube to auto-translate and make subtitles. I'm going to click on add language and I'm going to pick Spanish because maybe my students speak Spanish. That's their first language. I'm going to select Spanish. Now I see that Spanish is there. Okay. And when I go to subtitles, again, I have this option to add. When I click on that, now it's a little different. Now it says, well, how do you want to create these captions? I could upload a file. If I have a caption formatted file, something like a CRT or a VTT, I could upload that file. I could type it manually, meaning when I click on that, it's actually going to show me the text, and I could do it that way, but I don't want to do that.
Or, my third option, which is the one I'm going to use, which is auto-translate. It's actually going to generate an auto-translate based off of my edited caption. This is why it's important to make sure you edit them, because otherwise it's going to try and pull from your auto-generated ones. And if there's errors there, there's certainly going to be errors in the translation. What's nice here is it's showing me how it's going to look. I get to see what I'm saying and then how it's going to be displayed in Spanish for other users. Here, remember we were talking about the two lines of text. I might want to make some adjustments if I feel I need to. What I would do is actually wait until I have somebody else verify the text first, just to make sure if there needs to be some adjustments made. So, everything's looking good. I feel like it's what I need it to be for now. I'm going to hit publish.
All right, that is how to edit auto-captions. It's really easy. I have a lot of extra files here now, and that's okay. If you want to delete your files, like we don't need auto-captions anymore. We have a nice clean copy. We're going to get rid of this other one. If you go to the far right, you'll see some options, the little triple dots. Now I'm going to select delete. Now my auto-captions have gone away. How is this going to look for our viewers? What are they going to see? Let's view it on YouTube.
Here I have my video. You'll notice down at the bottom, I can see the close caption is turned on, has the little red line underneath. When I click on it, it turns it off. I'm going to turn it back on. And if you see at the top it was saying English, check the settings, right? Check the little gear for settings. When I click on that, I see some options. When I get to subtitles, I see two different subtitles. I see my English one that I've already created. That was the one we edited, and then the Spanish subtitles that I created. I'm going to go ahead and just keep it on English for now, and then I'm going to press play.
“Hello everyone. It is Jay, your teach...” Okay, there's my captions. Beautiful. Let's see it with the subtitles. So again, going back to the little gearbox, going to subtitles, and selecting Spanish. Now it's switched over to Spanish automatically.
This video is to go over... So, you'll notice I'm speaking in English, but the captions are showing up in Spanish. Now, if you noticed in our subtitle’s options, there's an auto-translate. Before we click on that, I'm going to go back to English, go back to my subtitles, and click auto-translate. It will now use my English captions and auto-translate those into an additional language for me. Let's say I've created my video in English, I have some students that speak Spanish, so I've created the subtitles in Spanish, but maybe I have a new student that's coming in and maybe they speak Korean or they speak German, or something else. I'm going to go ahead and find, there we go. I'm going to actually have it auto-translated to Korean. I do not speak Korean at all, so we're going to hope it's coming out fairly accurately for us.
But now you're going to see the Korean subtitles as I'm speaking English. ... For your next amazing assignment. Okay, so there you go. You can make subtitles that you can edit and adjust to make sure that those subtitles are accurate in multiple languages. But if you forget one, there's always the auto-translate.
The next thing I want to show you is the transcript. Remember we talked about being able to pull up a transcript from YouTube? I'm in the video player still. Down at the bottom, I see these little triple-dots again. When I click on that, I actually see “show transcript.” When I click on that, over to the right side of my video, a transcript has appeared and I see my text. It actually has a timestamp with it. If I go to the little triple-dots, I can toggle the timestamp. I can make them go away or not.
I love transcripts on YouTube, especially if it's a longer video and I'm just looking for some very specific spot of text or information, I can skim through and get to the spot that I want. But…” So let's get started.” You'll see text. Here's our topic. As I'm talking, it's actually going to highlight the text as I go. Okay? Something else to notice, is down at the bottom of the transcript, you'll see ‘English’ with a little dropdown, and it shows that I can have the Spanish ones that I have also created. Now you'll notice it's not giving me an auto-translate transcript, it's only giving me a transcript of the captions I've published, that I've created, not auto-translate. Now I have it in English and I have it in Spanish.
In addition to having this transcript like this, I'm actually going to copy it. I'm going to paste it, and I'm going to open up a Google Doc. Now I have my transcript in a document. Now here, you can see it, where it has the timestamps with it, but maybe I don't want the timestamps. I'm going to get rid of those timestamps. And again, just going to highlight all that text, “select all,” and “paste” it into my document. You'll notice the format might look a little weird, right? It's putting some paragraphs in some strange spots, but it's not bad. If you need a quick transcript, something that you can generate fairly quickly, this is a good option. You may want to keep the timestamps in it, just if it helps kind of keep it organized a little bit more for you. But that's a way that you can create a transcript on Google.
I want to go back to one of the tips I talked about where if I'm creating that Spanish subtitle file, what I like to do is work with my language interpreter that worked at the district, and I would actually print out a cop... Or not print out. I would create a copy of the Spanish transcript with the timestamps. So here I have the Spanish, I've selected it. I've got the timestamps, and I would send her the document with the link to the video, and so she could watch the video, look at the transcripts, and if she felt some things were, maybe phrasing really wasn't accurate, it was guessing. We work in education, so lots of terminology sometimes doesn't translate well, and we need to make some changes. Maybe because of the way the sentence is composed, they may feel it's better instead of it being on the line that it's in, they could say, you know what? You really need to move it to the next line because that's actually where they're saying it, et cetera.
What she would do would go through and edit, and make the changes here. And then because I had the timestamps, when I would go back into my video under Spanish, I could go and compare the timestamp that she gave me and make any changes that she said. And then it was a very nice, clean, accurate set of Spanish subtitles for my video.
So that's auto-generating, how to edit your auto-generated, and then also how to create a transcript from your edited captions, and also creating multiple language subtitles from those.
Now I want to look at some bigger chunks of video, and I want to show you some other things that you can do. Here I have, this is one of our BADA sessions that we did, and we had over an hour of content in this video.
Remember I talked about if you have a script, or if you purchase somebody to create your transcript of the presentation or the video, and then you can use that script or the transcript to make captions? I'm going to show you how to do that right now. Here I have, again, my auto transcript or my auto-generated captions, and then I also have that original language. Now, I could add a language and add English, but it's already made this one for me. I'm going to go ahead and click add. So again, I get that pop-up and it's giving me some choices. I could upload a caption file. A caption file is different than a transcript file. They come in a different formats. A caption file will have very different markings if you try to print it out. So it really wouldn't look like a transcript.
Auto sync; I could upload a document. I could type it, or I can paste in a full transcript and it will adjust the timings to the audio. I could type it in manually so I could listen to the video and I could type, hit “pause,” and continue to type. I'm actually going to hit this “auto-sync” because I have a file that I've already created. When I do that, again, it takes me to this nice big text box. And here is the transcript that I ordered. Then I made just a couple of adjustments because even though I ordered it, maybe they spelled my name wrong, or something like that. But it's a nice clean transcript. It's exactly how I want it to look. I know everything's accurate in terms of the content. I'm just going to hit “select all”. I'm going to “copy.” I'm going to go back into that text box and hit “paste.” Now everything's in there. And then I'm going to hit “publish.” Okay?
Now, you might see a window pop up, it didn't do at this time, but you may see a window pop up that says, this is going to take a really long time because it's got to generate a lot of data. But when I hit “publish”, if you notice on my screen where it said “add”, it now says “generating timings.” What it's doing is it's taking my transcript file, it's taking the text, it's listening to the video, and then it's going to sync my speech to my text. We're actually going to come back and check it later to see how accurate it is. Again, this is if you already have a script, if you've typed something out and you've read from that script to make your video, this is also a good way to do that. You may still need to make some adjustments, but at least it's better than having to re-edit all of those auto-captions, especially if you have a longer video.
All right, so again, some movie magic has occurred, and we have our subtitles that we added from the script or the transcript I pasted in there, and it generated the timings. The way I know that now, is back up to that original United States video language. When I scroll back over where it said generating timings, it now says published. That means it's done. It's ready for me to check out. I'm going to click edit, and now I can see that it has the captions tied to specific timings for my video. Again, this is where I would just listen to the video and watch it. Like I said before, I like to watch it at twice the speed, and watch through the whole thing. You may just find it sufficient to spot-check. Really, it's a preference choice. We'll see how it goes.
“Hello everyone. Welcome to Be A Digital Ally. It is that time again where we get to talk deep into...” Again, the same way as I did before, I can make some adjustments. Because I did add names and things like that, it might need a little bit more tweaking. Remember, I can just “click and drag” making that cursor move my boxes around a little bit as I need to. I can also adjust my timings by going into the timestamps or the boxes where the times are themselves. So again, once I'm happy with it, I click “publish.” And then just the same thing, I can add my language. But that way it's faster if you have longer videos if you already have a transcript to use to generate your captions as opposed to the auto-generated. Auto-generated is good if you don't have anything else, but this is just a little trick you might want to use as well.
Hopefully, you have gained some new skills in how to edit captions and transcripts on YouTube. It is not perfect, right? It still requires a little bit of work, but it is such a useful tool for us to be able to upload content for our students to be able to access, and we want to make sure that that content is accurate. So it's really important for us to make sure that our captions are reflecting that content as well so our students really get the full benefit of the knowledge that we are sharing with them.
So from here, I'm going to kick it over to Melissa for any questions. I'm sure some of you are already familiar with using YouTube and maybe using captions. This would be a great time to share out any tips or tricks that you have. Maybe you have a great extension or something like that that you use to help you with the editing. Again, pulling out those fillers to help you with the formatting. I hope you guys have a great, great discussion, and thank you for letting me walk you through this.
>>Melissa: All right, and thanks to Jay for that. We are getting close to the five o'clock hour. I wanted to share that I am available to stay around for a few minutes after five for any questions. I do want to go ahead and wrap the session for those who might have a hard stop at 5:00 PM, but I do encourage you to ask questions and share your tips and tricks in the chat. I love Jay's tip about sharing the Spanish language transcript with a Spanish-speaking colleague in order to facilitate edits. And I appreciated her thoughts about a good workflow for working with longer videos. I've been working with YouTube for some time, but those are some great takeaways for me.
This brings us to our resources. We've got some really good stuff from Jay here. I will share those in the chat hopefully with everyone this time. The first link, Video Captions Benefit Everyone, is to a 2017 journal article reporting the results of over 100 empirical studies documenting that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language for children and adults learning to read and for persons who are deaf and heart of hearing. The second link is from the Minnesota Deaf Commission, and it addresses how captioning and subtitling benefit all students for increased literacy. And then finally, Captions For Literacy is a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of captioning and same-language subtitling for improving literacy.
So now it's your turn. If you do have questions, please share the questions that you have in the chat. If you don't have a question, maybe you have a tip to share, or you learned something new today or got inspired to try something different, please go ahead and share those in the chat. Before we go, I'd like to remind you of a couple of upcoming programs and events. Tickets are now on sale for AccessU, Knowbility's hybrid conference on accessible technology and design that takes place May 9th through 12th in Austin, Texas, and online via Zoom. The next installment of our Be A Digital Ally series, a monthly workshop series focusing on accessibility best practices, takes place on Thursday, April 20th. That's an online event. I'm really excited about this one. The topic is Planning Inclusive Events, and we've got some fantastic presenters for that.
We'd love to hear from you. Please let us know what you thought about today's session by completing a brief survey. I believe you can access this survey via this URL, Bit.ly/FebToolkit2024 with a capital F and a capital T. Yes, that's 2024. I will share a link to that in the chat.
Thank you for joining us today, and a special thank you to my colleagues, Adam and Julieanne for helping ensure things went smoothly today. My colleague Anthony for live tweeting the session and a big virtual round of applause for our IT person, Mark, who came in and adjusted those Google Drive sharing settings. If you were unable to access the slides at the beginning of the session, you might try again now. The sharing settings have been changed. We look forward to seeing you back next month on March 28th at four o'clock central. The topic of our next session is Focus Pocus: Assistive Tools Built into Windows, Word, Mac, and iOS that will help with the learning difficulty we all share. You can learn more about that and register on the Knowbility website. So thanks again, everyone. Those of you who do not have questions and need to leave, we will see you again next month. And if you do have a question, feel free to raise your hand or share it in the chat now.
All right, well, if we don't have anything, I'll ask my... Oh, I see Jack had a question about YouTube captions that I didn't address. Let's see what I missed Jock.
>>Julieanne King: Jock, you can come off mute and ask her directly.
>>Melissa: Yeah.
>>Jock: Okay, good. Simple, simple. I watch the PBS News Hour and I watch Ari Melber and MSNBC, and of course, all those things have got these things at the bottom.
>>Melissa: Yes.
>>Jock: They're all really great, but what happens if I have got, let's say, got some music or I've got somebody that's, I don't know, how do you start a campfire? I don't know, how do you wash your dog? Or whatever it might be. And I want to have something that's interesting and a little bit goofy. Not this stuff like it's MSNBC at the bottom. You understand?
>>Melissa: I believe so. Is that have something interesting and goofy within the caption content? Or you want to have something interesting and goofy on the screen and ensure that the captions don't cover it up?
>>Jock: Well, it's like, let's say that I've got Ray Charles with America the Beautiful, and I found a song Ray Charles from 1965 singing America the Beautiful, and I want to put something on there that's like wavy. [inaudible] Thing at the bottom look like PBS News Hour. I want to have something that's yellow and red, or red, white and blue. You see what I'm saying?
>>Melissa: I do, yes.
>>Jock: Perhaps the lecture today is really only for educational purposes and not for these things like Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful.
>>Melissa: Yeah. So the focus of today's session was using YouTube to generate captions and transcripts. If you wanted to then take the caption file you generated via YouTube into a movie editing program and create stylized captions, you would be able to do that. But YouTube itself is not capable of allowing you to change things like the color or size for viewers. You are not able to determine that for the viewer using YouTube. Unless you do those burned in captions, which we generally don't like. Great question, and a frequent question in terms of captioning controlling the appearance and positioning.
>>Jock: That's all I had.
>>Melissa: All right, thank you. And anyone else? I think Murphia may have stepped away. Well, Adam, perhaps we can bid farewell to Jock and Murphia and then the three of us can wrap things up. Thank you for coming. Appreciate it.
>>Jock: Bye-bye.