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How to access YouTube

Registering for YouTube

When registering for YouTube, there is an alternative audio option to the left of the Captcha. Simply clip the accessibility icon to the left of the word verification.

Image of Google Accounts registration form

An alternative to the Captcha is offered during registration for YouTube.

Video captions

When watching a video with captions/subtitles, you can...

Turn them on and off:

1. Click the "up arrow" button on the bottom right of the video player.

2. Click the captions/subtitles menu button. This button will only be clickable if there are captions/subtitle for this video.

You can also watch a video clip that explains how to turn captions on and off.

Image of Youtube's captioning page

Change the language:

Click the "up arrow" button on the bottom right of the video player.
Click the "left arrow" next to the captions/subtitles menu button. This button will only be clickable if there are captions/subtitle for this video. You can also try Auto-Translate of captions, if captions/subtitles are not available in preferred language.
Select the language you'd like to see subtitles in. Subtitles are only available in the languages shown. Video uploaders choose the languages for their videos' captions/subtitles.

Adding / editing captions

To add captions or subtitles to one of your videos, you'll need to have files with the captions/subtitles in them. You can obtain software to let you create these files, or ask other companies to do this for you, often for a small fee.

For now, each file can only contain one captions/subtitle track in a single language. To add multiple language tracks to a single video, please upload each file separately for that video.

Once you have the files, log into your YouTube account to upload them:

Mouse over the 'Account' link in the upper right corner of every page.
Click 'My Videos'. You will then be directed to a page showing your uploaded videos.
Find the video to which you'd like to add captions/subtitles, then click the 'Edit' button.
Click the 'Captions and Subtitles' link in the menu bar.
Click the 'Browse' button and find the caption/subtitle file to upload. Additional options will appear. Select the appropriate language. If you wish, you can also enter a track name.
Click the 'Upload' button.

Caption/Subtitle file information

YouTube currently supports a simple subtitle format that is compatible with the formats known as SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). Although you can upload your captions/subtitles in any format, only supported formats will be displayed properly on the playback page.

The supported format consists of text divided into separate caption (or subtitle) segments, in chronological order. Each caption must have three parts:

A timecode
The caption text
A blank line

Timecode: Specifies when the caption should be shown, and for how long.

Time is measured from the start of the video in these units:

HH - Hours starting at 00
MM - Minutes (00-59)
SS - Seconds (00-59)
FS - Fractional Seconds (0-999)

YouTube support the following timecode constructs:

HH:MM:SS.FS,HH:MM:SS.FS - Caption display starts at the first time, and stops at the second time. This is compatible with the SubViewer format.
HH:MM:SS,FS --> HH:MM:SS,FS - Caption display starts at the first time, and stops at the second time. For complete compatibility with the SubRip format, a 'subtitle number' can also precede this timecode.
HH:MM:SS.FS - Caption display starts at this time, but no stop time is defined. YouTube will try to figure an appropriate stop time.
Caption text: One or more lines of text. This text must be UTF-8 encoded so that any language can be supported.
Blank line: A blank line is used to mark the end of each caption.

Examples:

0:01:23.000,0:01:25.000

Text shown at 1 minute 23 seconds into the video, for 2 seconds

0:02:20.250,0:02:23.8

Text shown at 2 min 20.25 sec, until 2 min 23.8 seconds

0:03:14.159

Text shown at 3 min 14.159 sec for an undefined length of time.

00:03:45,6 --> 00:03:47,6

Text shown at 3 minutes 45.6 seconds into the video, for 2 seconds, in SubRip format.

Make sure you save the file with a .sub (for SubViewer) or .srt (for SubRip) file extension. This will usually mean selecting 'All files' as the file type in the Save dialog.

If your uploaded captions/subtitles are not available for online playback after a few hours, they may be in a format that YouTube does not yet support, or there may be something wrong with your encoding.

Help with captions

You can either obtain software to help you do it yourself, or arrange for a captioning/subtitling company to do it for you. Here are partial lists to get you started:

Captioning Guidelines:

Caption It Yourself

Online Captioning Sites:

Software:

Additional options

Media Access Australia maintains a number of articles that will help you find a number of accessibility options in your computer and operating system, assistive technology software, and web browsers.

Computers and Operating Systems, including buying accessible computers, turning on accessibility features in Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
Assistive technology software
Web browsers and broadband

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Additional Information

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HTML5 media player accessibility: the potential and the reality

In last month's W3C update I outlined some of the benefits of HTML5 that the W3C believes will have a significant impact on how people will use the web. As multitouch, tablet and portable multimedia devices become more popular the promise of drag-and-drop functionality and standardised video could have a great impact on our productivity and entertainment needs.

In terms of accessibility, there are two key areas that HTML5 has the potential to deliver: the ability for people with disabilities to use its new features, and effective communication between assistive technology and the web browser. This month we’ll look at the first one, and discuss the evolution of browser-AT interaction, WAI-ARIA, in forthcoming reports.

Accessible media players

One of the biggest issues for people with disabilities in implementations of current web browsing is video integration. For people who are hearing impaired, this means the availability of standardised caption techniques. For people with vision and mobility impairments, the biggest issue is keyboard navigation to actually play and control the video. With so many video formats and integrated players, simply playing a video can be an uphill battle.

While the new video standard offers great promise of improving and standardising captions, the W3C believes the huge step forward for web accessibility is the accessible embedded media player.

How does it work?

Currently websites like YouTube are difficult to use for people with vision and mobility impairments because the buttons in the video player, such as ‘play’ and ‘stop’, can’t be selected with the keyboard alone. Although solutions have been developed, they are non-standard, difficult to find, and it’s unlikely that the website a person with a disability wants to use will have an accessible player feature.

HTML5 basically provides new commands such as <video> and <audio> which can create and label the buttons in a way that allows keyboard shortcuts to access them, and screen readers to tell the user which buttons are available. This means a person who has a vision or mobility impairment can easily use the keyboard to start, stop and navigate around a video, and people who are vision impaired using a screen reader will also have words such as ‘stop’ and ‘play’ read out to them when the keyboard focus is on the buttons.

Can an HTML5 accessible media player be put on my website now?

Given that many web browsers support HTML5 to some degree, the answer is both yes and no. It can be done, but because HTML5 is still an evolving standard and both browsers and assistive technology products handle HTML5 commands in different ways, it’s hard to create an accessible media player that will work for everyone.

Having said that, there is an excellent guide published by Terril Thompson that provides many tweaks and hacks that can get a customised HTML5 accessible media player up and running.

How are the browsers and screen readers going with HTML5?

In terms of the web browser implementation of HTML5, Opera is leading the way and has enough functionality to support a standard accessible media player. Firefox 3.6 and Safari both work to some degree but still need some development, while Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome do not currently provide any support for HTML5 keyboard or AT accessibility. Microsoft has indicated, however, that more work will be done on this for the release of Internet Explorer 9.

As for screen readers, the best result for Windows users is to use NVDA with Firefox, and Mac users should consider the built-in tools of VoiceOver with Safari. JAWS for Windows currently doesn’t support many of the HTML5 commands.

Where to for HTML5?

The release of the HTML5 standard is currently one of the W3C’s highest priorities, and all the browser development organisations of Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google are heavily involved in the W3C. Although it will still be many months, possibly years until the standard is officially completed, the browsers will continue to evolve and accessibility will continue to improve.

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