YouTube this month announced that its automatic livestream captions will be available for all creators as part of its push to help make the platform more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people. (The automatic captioning option previously had been available only to channels with 1,000 subscribers or more.)
The news was welcomed by some YouTubers who previously were left out when creators live stream. However, while auto captions can provide a level of accessibility, they also, many times, only tell part of the story.
Auto captions working without a human eye, ear, or hand to monitor and guide them on such things as caption accuracy, completeness, and punctuation often fail to meet expectations, and can leave those who rely on captions for information with more questions than answers. Auto caps also have been known to have trouble with accented speakers, rapid-fire dialogue, proper nouns, or foreign phrases, words, and names, and routinely do not identify speaker or subject changes, often running one speaker’s captions into another in the middle of a line.
Though useful in a pinch, auto caption errors can make a video tough to understand and difficult for viewers to watch. Thankfully, creators can work with an experienced caption provider to add professional captions to their videos.
VITAC offers caption integrations for both YouTube Live and prerecorded videos. Our live captioners and coordinators are here for 24/7 customer support, and will work with content creators every step of the way. Leave it to us, and save yourself the hassle of transcribing your own video or hoping the auto-generated captions don’t leave you with embarrassing typos, incomplete sentences, misspelled names, or worse.