Occasionally, I make videos. Usually it’s when I review products. Sometimes it’s to share an experience I’ve had or to show you something I really like. My earliest videos were just music over action with occasional captions and no verbal track. Later I started making talkies. It’s all on a learning curve and as I learn more, my videos become more sophisticated. But there is something important I have been neglecting. I stumbled upon the obvious problem when my cousin got interested in my posts on Bohemian holiday entertaining. She was particularly interested in my absinthe posts. She was following my Facebook updates as I slowly collected my absinthe service set and asked if I would be blogging about it. I told her I was making a video about serving absinthe and would make sure to tag her when I published it. That’s when she hit me with it. My cousin is deaf.
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It’s not that I meant to exclude anyone. It’s that creating basic subtitles in iMovie is relatively easy until you are trying to create captions corresponding to a voice track. That’s when it quickly becomes a pain in the neck. So I braced myself for the ordeal. Then one of my cousin’s friends shared a link to a YouTube tutorial on adding closed captions to a video already uploaded to YouTube. I took a look and WOW! I had no idea it would be so easy! You simply open the CC generator and play the video pausing every few seconds to type in what was said in that segment. Then you just press play again and repeat until you finish the whole video. Easy-peazy, no special applets to download. And it’s free, no premium subscription to enroll in.
Every year I try to make a blog-related New Year’s resolution. This year, my New Year’s resolution is to add closed captions to every new video I create and go back and add them to my former videos. If a video is just music and pictures with occasional subtitles, I’ll still put in a closed caption that says, “music only” so members of the deaf community know they aren’t missing anything.
I would like to challenge my fellow bloggers and video creators to do the same. You’ll be surprised how easy it is and what a difference it makes.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie