Watching videos is more fun when they are accompanied with speech (unless you’re watching videos about animals or good old silent films). But what about those hard of hearing? For them, subtitles come as a salvation. Now, YouTube and TikTok simultaneously expand options for creating subtitles automatically or manually.
In April 2022, YouTube announced a new feature for creators. Now, YouTUbe Studio allows for delegating subtitles creation to third parties. While video creators focus on videos, specialists can write and sync the subtitles, saving them time. This is especially useful for independent studios where staff can be too busy with filming and editing videos themselves. The feature is implemented with addition of the new “Subtitles Editor” role among others.
Automatic captions in English work fine mostly, but the accuracy still suffers too often. It’s even worse with subtitles in other languages. So, curating their creation and translation is important for any video designed to be popular. Previously, YouTube had a similar feature called Community Subtitles, but ultimately it was removed, which frustrated a lot of users.
As for TikTok, it has already had the automatic caption feature. But the next step it takes to meet deaf people’s needs is to turn it on by default. Now, one needs to deactivate auto captions if they are not necessary. So far, this only covers English speech, but, knowing TikTok’s global popularity, other languages may follow soon. And yes, the creator can edit the automatic caption manually after it’s been generated.
What do you think of captions in videos? Do they help you if you are hard of hearing or don’t understand the spoken language well enough? If you are a creator, have you ever experienced problems with captions? Tell us your story in the comments!
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