Why would you want to add captions to your YouTube videos? I can think of a few reasons:
- Your videos become accessible to people who cannot hear.
- Your videos become more accessible to search. (Check out this search for three terms that only appear in the captions for this video. They’re not in the description text.)
- People watching your videos in an office/library can do so without headphones.
- Non-native speakers may find it easier to read the text.
- Captions can be translated (manually or automatically) into other languages, becoming subtitles and expanding your audience without you having to create multiple videos for multiple languages.
- Fun hacks.
Whoa, wait, what was #2 again? Search? Accessible? Did Wysz just give an SEO tip on his personal blog? Yep.*
So, how easy is it to caption your videos? Well, I screencasted the entire process for a video live. I did it for a pretty short video, but you get the idea of what the process is like:
In this demo, I used an application written for Google App Engine, since it’s free and easy. For more information about how to create captions and subtitles, check out this help article from YouTube.
* I work at Google on search quality. Look for me in the Google Webmaster Help forum. Oh, and anything I write on this blog is my own view and not on behalf of Google, etc, etc.
you outdid yourself by captioning the video showing how to do captions.
I did consider doing a screencast of me captioning the video about how to caption a video.
Careful if you start giving out SEO tips more regularly, you might end up with 60 irrelevant SEO questions in the comments of every post!
I can imagine that captioning instructional videos, such as railscasts (http://railscasts.com/), would be extremely helpful for search.
If only the job of writing captions was easier or more appealing, Google should make a game out of it, like the image labeler.