Video sharing sites

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Creating and sharing videos has become a vital form of online participation. While online audio description remains hard to come by, levels of captioning are increasing rapidly.

YouTube and Vimeo allow video owners to upload caption files. YouTube also has an automatic transcription feature based on Google’s voice recognition technology, although the results are often less than satisfactory. If you own the video, however, you can access the automatic caption file once it has been created and edit the captions.

In an effort to enable people with a disability to more easily participate in online video sharing, we published a guide to getting started with YouTube. This is particularly valuable for those who use assistive technology such as a screen reader.

How to find captioned videos on YouTube

YouTube allows you to filter search results by closed captioning. To do this:

  • Enter your search term into the search bar and click “search” or press the enter key. Search results will appear.
  • Click on the “Filter” button underneath the YouTube logo.
  • In the sixth column, marked “Features” select “closed captions”.
  • When watching your chosen captioned video click the caption button on the player (the red box with two horizontal lines) and select “English” as your option. This provides human-generated captions. The option of “English transcribed” provides machine-generated captions and may be inaccurate.

How to caption online videos

There are a number of methods you can use to add captions to a YouTube video or Vimeo video please see the detailed instructions in our Online Media section.


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Tags: TV & video