Why Are Captions a Key Concept for Accessibility?

Captions are necessary for media in Manifold projects because they provide accessibility for Deaf people or people who are hard of hearing.

If your video isn’t captioned, then it fails all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Don’t forget: at the UW, we want our digital media to be at the WCAG 2.1 AA level.

Captions are also useful for people who are learning new languages or who are in situations where they don’t have headphones or earbuds.

How Do I Put Captions into a Manifold Project?

In Manifold, one way that you can bring in captioned videos is to use YouTube. When you upload videos to YouTube, via machine learning, captions are added to videos.

But you must review your captions. The YouTube algorithms are okay, but they are not perfect and will frequently miscaption speakers in embarrassing or insulting ways. You can learn more about how to edit YouTube captions if you go to these “Edit or remove captions” instructions.

Once you have your video uploaded to YouTube, and once you’ve confirmed that its captions are accurate, then you can bring your video into Manifold in a couple of ways.

First, you can include your video as a link in your text, using meaningful hyperlink text. Here is an example:

“The video ‘A Husky Point of View’ won the UW Libraries video contest in 2022.”

Second, you can bring in your YouTube video as a Manifold Resource.

To do that, on the Admin side of Manifold, you select Resources > Add a new resource

After that, select the Video option and and click the IS THIS AN EXTERNALLY LINKED VIDEO? option.

Finally, add the video’s ID and save.

But another way you could bring videos into Manifold is as media files with captions burned into your video media files.

If you want to burn captions directly into a video (perhaps an MP4) that you have, then the first thing you can do is use YouTube to generate those captions. Just like in the example above, you can upload your video to YouTube, let YouTube make captions with machine learning, and then edit those captions to make sure they are accurate.

After that, however, instead of leaving your video in YouTube, you can download the caption file you’ve created with YouTube.

To do that in YouTube, on your Admin side, you click Subtitles.

Then, you click the three tiny little dots that appear when you hover over DUPLICATE AND EDIT. You’ll have the opportunity to download a file and make sure you download the file in the .srt format.

Once you have your .srt file, you can delete your video from YouTube.

Next, with your video file and with your .srt file, you can use the software Handbrake to burn subtitles into your video file. These are the instructions for “How to Add Caption Files to Videos in Handbrake.”

Finally, once you have burned captions into your video file, you can bring it into Manifold by uploading it as a Resource.