YouTube Adds Captions And Subtitles Feature In Videos

YouTube has added the closed captioned feature in videos, which will help the hearing disabled users and foreign language speakers. To add the captions, the user has to upload a separate captions file with the video.

YouTube earlier added annotations feature in videos to explain more background information about the video, explanations or links for further information. Google also added a speech-to-text technology for a small number of videos (political videos) and hopefully it will extend that to all videos. They added this feature to make the videos available in Google search. Now, they have added closed captioning feature, which is already available in Google Video.

Last month, Google showed a demo of a speech-to-text technology that automatically captions videos, but this doesn't work well for any kind of video. Even if the captions are provided by users or they are automatically generated, they will improve the quality of search results.

After you download the video, you can click the “Captions and subtitles” sections and upload the captions file.

YouTube explained this feature in its blog:

"Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience by allowing folks who can not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who are hard-of-hearing or speak other languages. Captions are in the same language as the video's audio track. Subtitles are in a different language,"

This will help the videos to get more views in other countries.

YouTube added support for closed captioning, a feature that was already available at Google Video. If you edit one of your videos, you can click on the "Captions and subtitles" section and upload a captions file.

To add closed captions and subtitles, YouTube has provided a number of sources here. Though I would have liked Google offer the same feature in YouTube itself.

YouTube supports two closed captions format, SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). YouTube allows more than 120 language options for subtitles.

To activate the closed-caption feature click the arrow at the bottom of the video and you will see a “CC” button. Click it to see the captioning. You can do the same sequence to disable captioning also. If there are subtitles in other languages, you will see that option also in that menu.

Click the arrow menu to see captions and subtitles

Googlesystem.blogspot.com (Public Domain)

For now the embedded videos do not show the caption feature, so click the link here (MIT Physics Lecture), Japanese Animation video and a Top Gear Clip with French Subtitles to see the captions.