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Las Positas College

YouTube Videos

Although YouTube has an auto-captioner, relying on it is not good enough for ADA-compliance. Therefore, posting videos that only use the auto-captioner and are created by someone else should not be done.

In fact, you should not rely on the auto-captioner if you are posting videos that you created. Even if you articulate well, the captions might seem to be working, but a closer look will reveal errors, particularly with grammar and punctuation.

Though an error here or there might not make a difference, with auto-captions the errors that are most likely to appear are misrepresentations of key words, vocabulary, and names--exactly the terms you want to get right for your students. The hearing-impaired rely on accurate captions, but so do students striving to learn the material better.

If you insist on using YouTube to post your videos, you can add your own captions or upload a transcript if you want. However, the most efficient way seems to be to allow YouTube's Automatic Captioner to caption your video, then you go in later and edit the captions.

Here is the whole process:

  1. Record your video
  2. Create a YouTube Account.
  3. Create a YouTube channel.
  4. Upload your video.
  5. Allow YouTube's Automatic Captioner to caption your video, then edit the captions when it is finished. View a video on how to edit auto captions.

Captioning Someone Else's Videos

If you insist on using someone else's video that has inaccurate captions, you can contribute to creating accurate captions. YouTube allows for community sourced captioning. Learn how to contribute captions.

You can also bring YouTube videos into Canvas Studio, but note that the captions, good or bad, do not carry over into Studio. But there is a work around for doing this. Learn how to caption YouTube videos in Studio.

Searching for Accurately Captioned Videos

You can search for videos with accurate captions in YouTube by entering your keywords in the YouTube search bar, clicking the Filter button, then clicking on Subtitles/CC.