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Hi! This is Eric with Globe Runner Search Engine Optimization and today we’re talking
about accessibility on the web. In my last video, we talked about alt tags and how alt
tags may help people with low vision or may use a screen reader to navigate your site
and they also help the search engines navigate your site. Now I want to talk about something
that is not talked about nearly as often as alt tags and that’s closed captioning. Closed
captioning in your video is an extremely important part of having a fully accessible site, but
it’s also becoming a very important part of having a very searchable video and a very
searchable website. It’s much simpler than you might think. To create a closed caption
on your video is extremely easy these days; you don’t have to do any time coding, you
don’t have to synchronize your closed captioning with your video, all you have to do is create
a transcript and upload it. Let me say exactly what that means. All you do is you listen
to your video and you transcribe it word for word what that video said and then you upload
that transcript to YouTube. To do that, you upload the video first, then go to the “my
videos” page and you click edit that video, and you’ll see a tab there that says “captions.”
Select that tab, browse and find the file that you created the transcript. The file
has to be saved as a text file, a txt file, that’s just a clean text file, you upload
and YouTube uses speech recognition technology and they actually synchronize it for you.
They take all of the work out of it! It’s very, very easy and I really encourage you
to do it. Make sure all of the videos that you upload these days are all closed captioned.
Now, it has two advantages like I said at the beginning: it’s going to make that video
accessible to people who are hearing impaired in some way, and just as importantly, it’s
going to make that video searchable. That entire transcription will be searchable. So,
no longer are you depending on the title and the description, you are actually using the
content of the video as searchable content that Google is now crawling. I just think
that’s brilliant. Anyway, thank you so much, this was Eric from Globe Runner SEO. Let’s
work together to make the web more accessible. Thanks!