YouTube expands automatic captions

Automatic captioning is the process of providing text or other interpretive or additional information for hearing impaired people through a television or other visual display. The captions offer hearing impaired people a baseline transcript of what is going on, for instance in a YouTube video.

The video-sharing site YouTube already generates automatic captions in English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. YouTube is improving and expanding its already existing automatic captions with an additional six European languages.

These languages include German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch and will bring YouTube's total number of languages within its automatic captioning service up to 10.

Better closed captions

With the current languages, YouTube viewers are able to click the “CC” button in the lower right-hand corner of eligible videos.

The quality of the captions on the site can also be improved via specific editing tools, which content creators can use. Creators can also upload their own scripts or transcripts to sync with videos on the site.

With the expansion, YouTube is able to reach even more hearing impaired people with its automatic captioning service.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com