#Captioning

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

“alt text for more info” “turn on cations for more info” no actually this is not where more info goes. These have a very distinct purpose. There are plenty of other places for more info. If you’re going to make your post inaccessible, the least you could do is not use accessibility tools at your own leisure for whatever purpose you see fit.

[elliespectacular]

how do you go about captioning other peoples' videos? i mean this logistically; like does penny for example just trust you with her youtube account for the sake of writing subtitles into the videos? or is another thing happening

(asking bc i'm impressed by the quality of your subtitles and want to get into making subs for other peoples' videos as a Thing)

Caption files can be generated in any software that supports it. YouTube has an in-house caption editor that gets the job done but it's not very user-friendly. Newer versions of Adobe Premiere Pro and other editing suites have features that let you write and export a caption track (usually in .csv, or .vtt format) that contains the text, timings, and formatting. There are lots of options out there!

All you need in order to write captions for someone else is one such software and the final draft of a video, that way you can line everything up to the exact timing. Doesn't hurt to brush up on proper captioning etiquette too!

@sophie-baybey usually does the captions for Penny and she uses Premiere's caption editor. Personally I use subtitle-horse.com which is browser-based and does just about everything you'll need in the free version.

Since I tend to edit the highlight videos, captioning them is pretty straightforward when I do it - but we also have a production group chat when we need Penny or myself to clarify something that's hard to hear or a reference we don't get etc. I tend to send Sophie the isolated speech as a separate audio file just in case the audio balancing makes certain portions hard to parse. Like any collaborative project, communication between team members is key!

[incognitopolls]

This is not asking about musical numbers or directly story-relevant lyrics.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

I deeply appreciate you tubers who do their own captions instead of relying on the autogenerated ones, and I'd like to encourage that. However, I think many of them could benefit from reading even one professional captioning style guide.

The first, most basic rule of comprehensibility that I learned in my time doing captions was that any time you type a comma (,) or period (.), you should move to the next line of captions onscreen. We should not be seeing multiple sentences or sentence fragments onscreen at once! It can be difficult to keep up with as a viewer, and it is cluttered to look at visually.

[chaotic-so3k]

I plan on making English captions for Padlás (Attic) over the summer, so it will probably be up on YT by October!

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

TUMBLR PHANNIES!

we gotta talk about captions and accessibility!!

i did this during my time on phannie twitter and now that i finally have my tumblr back, i’m doing it here.

when you are posting screen recordings from dnp videos and captions on youtube are available, PLEASE POST THEM WITH CAPTIONS! it takes 1 second to turn on cc on youtube. it’s the absolute bare minimum.

there are deaf/hoh phannies (i am one of them) and we need and deserve captions!! there are TONS of people who benefit from captions outside of people with physical hearing loss, like people with adhd, autism, sensory processing disorder, auditory processing disorder (which is a type of hearing loss but not physical—ears can hear but brain can’t), tbi, people who aren’t native english speakers (or whatever language content is in), and even hearing/neurotypical people/native speakers miss stuff!! literally everyone benefits from captions.

transcripts, image descriptions, captioning things yourself, and other types of accessibility features are essential for making things truly open for everyone, AND i recognise those things take more effort, so we DO NEED TO AIM FOR THAT and i’d love to open a conversation about it, because people deserve that effort, but as a START, PLEASE TURN ON CAPTIONS BEFORE YOU SCREEN RECORD.

if anyone has any questions i’m more than happy to chat and i imagine other disabled people in our community would like the opportunity to speak about their own needs. i don’t speak for all disabled people.

and my fellow disabled phannies, i love you SO MUCH and we deserve accessibility that we simply aren’t getting.

TURN ON CAPTIONS

[hermitcraft-lifeseries-subtitles]

INTRODUCTION POST

Hi, welcome to the project and blog! A blogject, if you will! This blog is dedicated to providing subtitles for short-ish Life Series or Hermitcraft fanworks on YouTube, free of charge. :)

Want your video subtitled? Fill out the form here!

Have a question? The askbox is always open!

Need clarification? Shoot me a message!

I hope to subtitle your fanworks soon! :D

[cy-cyborg]

I love bg3 but i cant be the only one who thinks the subtites in the game...need work, right? It's mainly the floating subtitles, the type the game uses while you're out exploring, where the dialogue appears over a character's heads. Every time my party starts talking, I have to stop dead in my tracks because otherwise they will wander off screen and I won't be able to understand them. This is especially frustrating when dialogue starts while navigating multi-level environments where some of the party members take a while to catch up.

Like don't get me wrong, I appreciate that we can add the background to the text and make it bigger so it's easier to read but that doesn't help when the character speaking decides to wander off (or just lags behind the player chatacter enough that they are no longer on screen).

Game devs, please just put them at the bottom of the screen and add the character's name to the front if you're worried about confusion. This floating subtitle method is harder to implement and is far less accessible. It's literally more work for a less accessible option.

Also, just because someone is singing doesn't mean you can stop captioning. My Tav helped alphira write that song, I want to know what she's saying.

[farglefarf]

Hey I know my falsettos captioning posting is dead but I do have a question idk how to answer.

I don't caption things much, and so idk how a lot of caption ettiquet and norms really are. In this case, however, I do have a pdf of the og script (*details about what my references are below the break if you want lol).

Mostly Idk what to do with the lines that are thrown in improvisationally throughout the show that arent planed out. Do I caption those? I can't hear all of what they say, and there isn't a reference to it I can find. Do I just do my best? Do I ignore the non-script entirely?

(with which is largely the same words as the 2016 script. They are different. If I don't know what the changed lines are I Google it pretty much. Most lyric sites don't use punctuation or worry about grammar, but the script does. I think the punctuation adds to the meaning of the sentences sometimes. (A la "commas save lives") )

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

I've been watching Latino films lately, particularly ones from the 70s and 80s whose vhs recording was uploaded with the subtitles embedded into the video and knowing both Spanish and English makes it extra interesting because some things are just translated to be similar but off, others aren't translated/subtitled at all, sometimes they'll just randomly change a characters name (??)

And a lot of times captioning programs cannot handle the "special characters" in Spanish of anything with an accent on it. Sometimes they are fun weird symbols like question marks that make the sentence impossible to read, other times they simply drop the letter entirely, also fucling up readability

Subtitles and captions are an accessibility tool and people deserve access to accurate subtitles in the language that they claim to have available

[mr-mimir]

Can anyone explain to me why youtube shorts (and tiktok idk) have such bad captioning? It must be an automatic captioning system, but why do none of the creators (or even their editors???) take the time to actually correct the mistakes?? Are they unable to edit automatic captions or what because I just can't wrap my head around it.

[arctic-hands]

I said this in the tags of the last post I captioned, but it should be said in its own post too. I love how many people are transcribing tweets, either in post bodies or in alt text, about Palestine and other urgent matters, but I'm noticing that people aren't captioning the photos often attached to the tweets. One of the most important rules for image describing is that if the sighted can see something, the blind and hard of seeing NEED to have it described too, even if the visuals are something unpleasant. I promise you that if a sighted person can handle seeing a distressing image, the blind can handle hearing the description of said image.

[rat-kingster]

The real project 2025 is me figuring out youtube captions for The Alley

[allegramorgan]

Show: *is produced by CBS*

Captions: Made possibly by CBS

Captions: *not synced* *often say different words, sometimes completely different phrases from what the actors actually said*

How is it so hard to get fully accurate captions? For folks like me who ALWAYS keep captions on, it’s distracting and annoying to have it not match up. Can’t they give the final scripts to the captions department after filming? Does no one ever proof-read the episodes? There’s so much that’s obviously wrong that it seems they just run it through voice-to-text and call it a day. And let’s not forget that for hearing-impaired folks who are actually relying on the captions, this can make things hard to understand because they don’t know what the words are supposed to be when a character’s speaking too fast for the software to understand, but a proof-reader could, or the script would’ve spelled out.

[orwellsunderpants]

K I'm gonna rant about the Good Omens 2 subtitles for a minute.

When I tried to use them, they were badly out of sync with the actual dialogue. Like, five to ten seconds out of sync. I had to turn them off because it was too distracting.

I used to do captioning for money. If I had captioned something the way Amazon captioned Good Omens 2, I would have been fired on the spot.

I don't think Amazon hired human captioners. I think they fed the script into some kind of caption-regurgitating app and then never bothered to check whether the captions actually lined up with what was on screen. This was a very bad idea.

It's also extraordinarily disrespectful to the audience. So many people rely on captions to be able to understand what is going on in the dialogue.

I also wonder whether Amazon is out of compliance with FCC regulations for having their captions so out of whack. The FCC specifically requires that captions be properly synchronized with dialogue, but I don't know whether Amazon or other streaming services are subject to those regulations or not.

(Please don't @ Neil Gaiman about this. It's not his fault and it isn't something he can fix.)