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Here's one way you can create an accessible video tutorial
I'm going to be using Camtasia Studio which you may download and install from the UAA keyed software
(depending on whether you have a PC or a Mac)
and right now it is available on the PC
under Camtasia Studio and I understand they are in the process of making it available
for the Mac. Let's see if it's there today. I think they're still working on it. Yes, not there yet.
When you go to install that, its pretty self explanatory. Just click on this very first link and download and install that to your computer.
The second step is to actually create a video and there's a number of ways to do that. What I did was I used the software that came
with my webcam. I happen to have a Logitech webcam so I used this Logitech webcam software and I did a "quick capture."
And there I am! I just changed it to video and I hit this button and I recorded my video...and I have it saved.
After you have recorded your video, then the next step is to import that video into Camtasia where we can
edit it and add some captions to it. So I'm going to hit "import media" and
find that video I just recorded.This one happens to be in WMV format. I take the video and I drag it down here to the timeline.
I'm going to accept the default size
and I can go through using this preview window. I can play the video and make sure it looks OK. If I need to do any editing at all then
I can learn about Camtasia Studio a couple different ways. There is a lot of information here on the help
menu in Camtasia. There's a "getting started" project which is a really useful 5 minute program
there is also a link to the learning center which will give you a lot of videos on how to.
So if you need to do some editing to this video...I'm going to leave it as is and go on to the next step which is to
actually add some captions to it, to make it accessible. So what I'm going to do is...I don't see captions
listed down here so I'm going to hit "more" and there I will find captions.
I'm going to go to "speech-to-text." I've already gone through this and I have Windows 7
and I've gone through this setup and this is a pretty short video so it's not going to take too long, but the longer your video is,
the longer this step will take. So I'm going to pause the video for a moment until the transcription is complete.
OK so now it is completed and notice that the captions
have only three lines of text just because that's all that will fit at the bottom of this video here. Notice also that they have timings here.
That's important. And those timings are reflected down here on the timeline
so if they aren't timed exactly right, I can just drag the size of those boxes to make it precise
so that it actually shows the words exactly as they are being said...so that's important!
This might be more accurate because it's my voice, and my computer is trained in my voice. But when I have tried this with other people's
voices, it is way off base. Another option is if you have a transcript. If you have a transcript,
then you can just copy and paste from the transcript and that will make sure it's very accurate and save you a lot of time as well.
In this case, I'm going to pause it one more time and I'm going to edit these captions as I play this video and I'll show you how I get
started. I'm going to go ahead and hit play here (you can't hear it, but...)
And right off the bat I can see it says "below" when I actually said "hello" (laughter)
then instead of "accessible" it put in "sensible."
And I can see a couple of other just typos because I know what I said here.
So I would just continue on that way. I'd keep hitting play and then pausing it and going in and making corrections.
You have to be careful of this red text and copy and paste or I should say, cut and paste that to the next one
because they cannot be longer than three lines. Then, as I said, using this timeline at the bottom I might also have to slightly adjust
the location and size of each of these caption boxes and if necessary
I might want to use this zoom and zoom in a little bit more so I can actually see those a little bit bigger.
But now I have more to scroll across. This is really only a 4 minute, 15 second video, or so, but you can see it looks pretty big and it will
take me a little bit of time. So I'm going to pause the video while I do this task.
So after you have gone through watching your video and making changes to these caption
boxes up here to reflect what is being said and also down here to make sure the timing is spot on.
Then you need to make sure to save your project again. And then the last step is to "produce" and if your
window is a little bit larger you will see that "produce and share" option
and you have a ton of different choices. So what I usually do is just go directly to YouTube.
And if you aren't logged in, it will ask you to log in there...to YouTube (so you do need a free YouTube account) to be able to do this.
That just takes a minute here and then it's going to give me an opportunity to
make some changes to the details, description, etc., title of this video.
So I have entered a title, description, tags, and category which I can always change any time in YouTube.
I have an option for privacy which really doesn't matter at this point. I'm going to go ahead and make it private for now until I know
it looks good and again I can change that option once I'm in YouTube. The important thing is the last one. I have to
make sure that I am uploading the captions along with the rest of the video.
So then I just hit finish and this is the part that
might take a few minutes. Again I'm going to pause the video and reopen in just a minute
and show you what it looks like once it's been added to YouTube.
Once the video has finished processing, it opens YouTube for you
and the video might need to process a few more minutes but once it is finished,
I'm going to go ahead and hit "play" so you can see that the captions appear. (I'm going to just pause that for a moment, but...)
Then when you hit the CC down below, you can actually translate those captions to a whole bunch of other languages.
(You can scroll down this way) That is pretty cool. I'm just going to pick...let's see...Greek, for the heck of it!
And there we go! There I am, translated to Greek! So hopefully this has been useful for you in creating accessible video tutorials.