I’ll admit that at one time I didn’t understand the importance of captions being added to videos. I saw it as hard and cumbersome. Then a few years back, I was privileged to sit in a meeting with Steve Dye. Steve is a champion and catalyst for reaching deaf people with the good news of Jesus Christ. It’s very personal to Steve as he himself is deaf.
In that meeting, I learned that Steve is a very good lip reader also! He spoke of how many deaf people want to be involved. With many of the videos that our client was producing, they included graphics so as to where the speaker could not be seen. The issue with that, there aren’t any lips to read.
It became very clear that we had to do something. Closed captioning was the answer. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic wand to make them appear. Even with Google’s and Facebook’s best efforts to add them automatically, they weren’t quite right. I began to listen and try to edit the files myself at first. This proved to be quite time consuming and impossible for long-form videos.
After much research, I learned about a resource call Rev. You can upload your video to them or even to YouTube or Vimeo and they will caption your video for $1 a minute. Not only was this affordable, but their turn around time has generally been around 2-4 hours. This is amazing when you are trying to get a project completed quickly.
Not only will the file you submit be captioned, here are three additional uses for the Rev captions file:
- Download the caption file in various formats when it is complete and add it to all the platforms your videos are on including Facebook.
- Add the files directly into your professional video editor and export them for playback on television.
- Export a text file and then use that to have a transcript of the video to create a blog post for those who prefer to read versus watch a video. Creating more blogs will aid in your organic search results too!
It was a large commitment, but most of the video library available online for the client was over time converted to include captions.
When creating your next video project, keep in mind the need to make it accessible for all potential viewers. Use Rev or a similar service to add captions and then take advantage of the transcript to expand your digital footprint.
As always, if you need help with any of this, contact us at Dogwood. We stand ready to help!
