Video Accessibility Guide

Google has a good tutorial about uploading videos to YouTube available.

• Know YouTube’s privacy options and upload your video accordingly:
  • Public: anyone can find and view your video
  • Unlisted: anyone who has the link can view your video, but it won’t show up in search results
  • Private: only the account that uploaded the video can view or find it

Once you’ve uploaded your video, you have to activate captions for YouTube to auto-generate a set of captions for you and then you can do some basic clean up to ensure the quality and accuracy of the captions.

• If you go in to Edit your newly uploaded video, access “More options” and there is a section labelled “Original video language, subtitles, and CC”.
• Select the language (and regional dialect/variant if applicable) in this section and YouTube will use your choice to generate captions. You should then see a new set of Subtitles and CC appear under the dropdown.
• Download the subtitle file it generated and open it in a Notepad or TextEditor app, and add appropriate punctuation or correct obvious mistakes in the auto-generated text. Save the file without changing the extension.
• Using the “Upload subtitles/CC” and the “with timing” option it offers, re-upload the file you had downloaded and updated in the previous step.
  • Save your changes at this point before continuing
• Click on three dots on top of one another at the right side of the grey bubble which says “[Language] by YouTube (automatic)”, or if you’ve edited them it will say “[Language] by you”. Clicking these three dots (referred to by Google as a “kebab menu”) will offer you the option to “edit on Classic Studio”. Select that option.
  • In Classic Studio, click the “Edit” button in the top right corner.
  • Use the editor to finesse the timing of your captions (under the video), make corrections, or make additions (along the left side of the editor).
  • Play the video through at least once to ensure the captions are appearing as you wanted them.
  • When you’re satisfied, click the “Publish edits” button in the top right corner. YouTube will likely show you a pop-up double-checking that you’d like to overwrite the existing version of your captions with this newly edited version. Accept the overwriting by pressing “Publish” to continue.
• You can download the completed subtitle file from YouTube in a variety of formats if you would like to use it in other programs as well.
• If you’ve made your video public, you may also want to adjust the “Comments and Ratings” options right below the “Original video language, subtitles, and CC” section.
  • We recommend you either “hold all comments for review” or “disable comments” entirely to avoid “trolls” or “trolling”