How-to Guide for Captioning YouTube Videos

A how-to guide on how to caption videos on YouTube. This is information specific to the process used for the A11YChi meetup.

The Steps:

1. Login to A11YChi YouTube account.
2. Download YouTube auto-captions from raw live stream video.
3. Open edited YouTube video, navigate to CC/Captions
4. Create New Captions from Auto-Captions or Other Source
5. Publish sync'd captions, disable auto-captions

Login to A11YChi YouTube account

You should have received the authentication information for logging into the A11YChi YouTube account. Log-in to the account.

Download YouTube auto-captions from raw live stream video

1. Once logged in, navigate to the Creator's Studio, then under the heading Creator's Studio, select Video Manager, Videos.
2. Navigate to the raw live stream video. Next to the Edit button, select the drop-down, and select Subtitles/CC.
3. To the right of the video, under Published, select the English - Automatic captions.
4. From the Actions drop-down button, select a file format (any works). The captions file will be saved to your computer.

Open edited YouTube video, navigate to CC/Captions

1. Navigate to the Creator's Studio, then under the heading Creator's Studio, select Video Manager, Videos.
2. Navigate to the edited video. Next to the Edit button, select the drop-down, and select Subtitles/CC.
3. From the resulting "Manage subtitles and closed captions" screen, select the Add new subtitles or CC dropdown button, and select English.
4. Under Select Method, select Create new subtitles or CC.
5. The following screen presents the video, along with the auto-generated captions in edit mode. You can edit and re-sync these captions, or delete the auto generated captions, and copy/paste the captions to sync them. The following instructions provide guidance on manually copy/pasting the captions and syncing them. To remove the auto-generated captions, select the link Remove auto-generated content.

Create New Captions from Auto-Captions or Other Source

1. Manually enter, or copy/paste the caption text for the first set of captions.

2. Select the "+" button to place it in the caption timeline.

3. In the video's caption timeline, drag the left and right handles (blue) to sync the captions with the audio.

Caption text should be chunked into groups of text, breaking at natural speech breaks, or once a text limit of two lines has been reached.

Publish sync'd captions, disable auto-captions

It is highly unlikely that you will finished captioning a 45-60+ minute video in one sitting. It's perfectly fine to Save the changes, even publishing them. You can also edit or add to them further in future visits. The auto-captions will still be the default captions, until to delete them once finished with the manual caption entering and syncing.