Adding captions to YouTube Videos

As an occupational therapist I care a lot about accessibility. The whole foundation of my profession is working with people to enable them to participate in the things that they want and need to do in their daily lives. Often all it takes to enable participation is that the environment be made accessible. It is for this reason that, when I entered a video contest on Vimeo, I was really embarrassed when someone pointed out that I had not made my video accessible because I had not used captions. I, like most people, am learning how to use technology as I am using it and can only create at a very basic technical level. Fortunately, creating closed captions with YouTube videos is very basic and easy. Mashable has a tutorial and I will link to that because I can't explain it any better. http://mashable.com/2010/01/16/youtube-captions-how-to/

The easiest method is to do the captions by voice recognition. After you transcribe the video, Google's voice recognition places the captions into the right spot in the video and I was amazed at how accurately it was able to do it. I noticed with the following video that using this method the timing is off at the very end but other than that the timing was pretty true.

Using Caption Tube is more accurate but also more time consuming and technical. I found that I had to wait for it to buffer multiple times when working with the following video which is only 22 seconds long. I somehow ended up with double captions in places and I was happy to see that CaptionTube saved my work and I was able to go back and make edits. Even though this method was more technical and time consuming I think that it gets easier with a little bit of practice. Here is a video that I captioned using CaptionTube.