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YouTube Adds Captions

All YouTube videos can now include captions created by speech recognition software.

YouTube has been trialling automatic captioning since last November and recently announced the extension of the feature to all videos.

“Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer,” said a YouTube statement. “The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version … We are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users.”

Viewers of a video can click on the arrow at the bottom right of the video screen to turn subtitles on or off. They can also set YouTube to turn subtitles on automatically for every video they watch. Users can also change the size of text and the characteristics of the background.

Video publishers will also be able to upload corrections to the automated script or their own transcripts of what is said in a video and YouTube will then run those as subtitles. YouTube has said that, once text files are attached to videos, they could be used as the basis of automated translations with options to translate captions into any one of 50 different languages.

It will take time to go back through the many millions of videos uploaded over the years, but a publisher can request that their video be processed for captioning to speed that process up.

The introduction of automated captioning makes YouTube an attractive option for organisations that want to fulfil their accessibility duties without significant cost. However, simply uploading videos to YouTube won’t be enough. Video publishers will also need to check that the automated captions reflect the content accurately and fix them when they don’t.