If It’s Scripted, It Should Be Captioned

andreashettle:

captionedwebtv:

urbancripple:

Dear Content Creators,

If you’re making a video and following a script, there is absolutely no reason for that video to not have captions included (and I’m not talking about the auto-generated kind). Be kind to your deaf and hard-of hearing audience (or hell, just people who don’t want to turn on the sound) and include the freaking captions!

Absolutely. Have info for content creators at captionedwebtv.blogspot.com on the page “Information for Web TV Producers.” It’s the most popular informational page on the blog.

More specifically, the “Information for Web TV Producers” is here: http://captionedwebtv.blogspot.com/p/producer-information.html

If you already have a script, then starting the captions is as simple as uploading your script into the captions editor thingy (there are different kinds). After that, you just need to synchronize the captions correctly so they appear when the words are being said and not too long before or after.

Or if you improvise and don’t use a script at all (for example, interviews in which only the questions might be scripted) then some of the captioning software options do start with the autogenerated craptions as a kind of rough draft, which a human can then edit to get rid of all the errors.

If you do the captions yourself, then the captioning will be free except for the time commitment involved with editing or writing captions. If you pay someone else to do it, then it may be as little as $2 or $3 per minute of video. So a 5 minute video might only take $15 to caption.

And it’s not just people who are deaf or hard of hearing who benefit, it is also people with auditory processing disorder, people who learned English as a second language and find it easier to understand printed English rather than spoken English, and so on.