I Heart CC: Why and How to Caption Videos Folks Love | Accessibility NYC Meetup Recap

MERYL: Let's get on with the show. I'm Meryl Evans. It rhymes with beryl, not pearl. Pronouns she/her.

I've got long hair and a black shirt. I don't have any New York shirts, but I have a Brooklyn Dodgers jacket. I have lots of connections to New York. My dad was born and raised in Brooklyn and is a fan of the Dodgers.

Let's test the chat box. Tell me about the connections you have with New York. Meanwhile, I'll continue. My dad left New York when he joined the Air Force and found his way to Texas, where he met my mom.

So I'm a native Texan, born and bred in Fort Worth. We lived in Plano, right next to Dallas. I was born profoundly deaf. This is my dad and me when I was about 4 or so.

My vintage hearing aid has a heart on it, and I'm dressed in red. Clearly it's Valentine's Day. My mom made me hearing aid cases to match my outfits. And Kathy was born and bred in Upstate New York.

Awesome, Kathy. Dan is a Dodgers fan but he prefers LA, not New York. We'll all just have to agree to disagree. And Thomas lived in New York for 7 years.

His dad was born in Queens. Kate is native to New York. A native New Yorker. What might surprise you if you've never met me -- many people make assumptions.

Even accessibility pros and one Vice President who shall remain nameless. They assume I know Sign Language. I don't. That's neither a good or bad thing.

It just is. Deaf and hard of hearing people are different. I can only speak from my own experience. I rely on lipreading and my bionic ear, which is a lot cooler than saying cochlear implant.

And my day job, when I'm not an accessibility and caption pusher, I'm a digital marketing handler and project management wrangler. And Arthur says he's living 600 kilometers North of New York City, but he loves New York City. Did you know that once upon a time, you needed a secret decoder to watch captions? Okay.

Maybe it was not so secret. Because it was definitely not cool. The caption decoder was a clunky thing. It had all these dials.

The only thing that mattered was turning it off and on. The rest didn't do anything. 90% of the time. Boy, have we come a long way since 1983.

Now we don't need any special equipment to view captions. We can watch captions wherever we go. Whether it's a hotel or a friend's house or on a device. How cool is that?Here's the agenda for our time together.

You know captions don't just magically appear, and you probably know that automatic captions don't count. So we'll dig into how captions work. And Mirabai, our captioner, says her dad was born in New York, she's lived there for 17 years, and her son is a fifth generation New Yorker on her wife's side! And Charles says he's a native Long Islander.

Regular commuter to New York City and hopefully soon to be in Brooklyn! Thomas is fifth generation also? So you have options for captioning your video. And many people complain captions suck.

Following these tips will ensure yours don't. Captions don't magically show up by themselves after you create a video. They typically require two things. The video, of course, and the text file with the captions.

Even if you use YouTube automatic captions, it usually creates a caption text file. You can download it and use it. The formats that you and I will use most likely are SRT and WebVTT. But there are tons of formats.

The captions are on a text file that you can open in a text editor. My career... My career as a magician is a non-starter, because I give away secrets. The magic happens in the timecodes that tell the captions when to appear and disappear.

When you play the video that uses the caption file, it's called closed captions. Since it's a text file, search engines can read it. That's how you get the benefit of SEO with closed captions. You have many options for adding captions to a video.

And I'm showing you the general process of captioning a video. I'm using YouTube because it's free and most people have an account. This will show you how to add captions to a video on YouTube. Open subtitles to select the video you want to caption.

If you have a script, you can use Auto-sync. This is where you copy and paste your script. Let's grab the script, to paste it here. Select assign timings.

You can see the captions are there from the script. I'm going to break up the long lines, to keep each one no longer than 32 characters per line. Let's test the timing of the captions and the audio.

Hey, y'all. Meryl Evans here, creating a short clip...

I will shorten the very last line, so the captions end when I finish speaking. Otherwise, it looks perfect. If the timings are off, you can adjust the timings by moving the sliders back and forth until it's right. After you've confirmed the captions are in sync, publish.

And you can download the files to use wherever you publish the video.

MERYL: The length of the caption lines matter. More on that later. Second, at the end, when I elected to download the video, I could download SRT, VTT, or SBV. SBV is short for SuBView.

It's a caption format that's similar to SRT. Next is what is in the SRT file I downloaded from YouTube at the end of this video. SRT is short for SubRip subtitle File. You'll see it has numbers followed by a time code and then the caption.

The captions show up on the video here with the first time code, and then it goes away when the video reaches the second time code. Now I'll show another format. It's a VTT file. It's modeled after the SRT, but it takes captions a step further, by allowing you to format the text, control the punctuation, and other things.

It has the same text as the previous example, but it doesn't have sequence numbers. Just the time code showing the start and end of each caption. For those who are brave enough, you can use the VTT caption, but it's best to leave it to the default caption style. The only thing you may want to control is the placement of the captions to avoid overlapping the on screen text.

The code to add a video and captioned file to a website is simple enough. Or so I thought. This is the code you enter in a web page. The first time I posted it, the captions worked only on Firefox.

After a lot of fiddling, it worked on Chrome. To ensure it worked in Edge, I needed to add the meta attribute and the head. You may also need to check your website always uses HTTPS security encryption. Otherwise, the captions won't work in some browsers.

You can have multiple tracks for providing captions in other languages. You can see the example... At Meryl.net/webvtt, which I copied into the chat box. Unfortunately, captions don't look the same on all devices.

I watched a movie on Amazon Prime on TV. Whenever a song came on, the captions showed hashtags instead of musical notes. I wanted to capture it and play the movie on my desktop. This time it had musical notes!

Captions are not consistent across platforms. Test them. Here we are at the cola wars of captions. And like cola drinks, there's a clear winner here.

What's the difference between open and closed captions? Users can turn the captions on and off. Depending on the platform, they can usually change how the captions look. You can even change them here in Zoom.

The caption text file which is covered -- search engines can read that file, which is why caption files have SEO. The text file makes it possible to do translations. Closed captions require uploading two files, which have two problems. First, it's complicated for some people.

Second, some websites or platforms don't allow you to upload a caption file. There are other downsides to closed captions. They have disappeared or don't appear when they should, for a myriad of reasons. One example is when you click a YouTube link from a DM on your phone's LinkedIn app, it won't show up.

As for open captions, they always show up. Because it's glued on the video. Those engines can't read them, and you can't turn them off and on. Some people don't like that, because it affects their viewing experience.

Users cannot change the formatting. If the background color is bad, viewers are stuck. Many creators don't know captioning best practices and don't always make good captioning choices. So closed captions give viewers more control and creators don't have to worry about the font or color choices.

Captions adjust to the screen size. They move and grow and shrink based on how you interact with the player controls. Or resize the screen. Some platforms allow you to move the captions, like on YouTube and here on Zoom.

You can customize the captions here too. You can see I've moved the captions to the top of the screen. Maybe not? Oh, that was a previous one.

Sorry about that. Closed captions change size and move based on the screen or device. If you flip your phone sideways, the captions will adapt and get larger. If you expand the screen, captions get larger.

When you work with player controls, the captions will shift up, and these two images show before and after opening the player controls. The left shows standard captions. The right shows the player controls with the captions moved up. Open captions stay put.

They don't change with the screen size or move when the player controls pop up. So the player controls overlap the captions, which affects readable. So what are your options for getting a video captioned? First of all, I didn't say autocraptions.

You have three options for captioning. You can do it yourself, use a company that provides captions services, or automatically caption the video and edit the captions, which I'll show you next. The list of captioning tools is long. What's the best one?

You're gonna hate my answer. It depends. It depends on your processes and preferences. Would you publish an article on your website if it has typos and other errors?

Well, then, would you publish captions on your website if it has typos and other errors? That's what automatic captions are and why I call them autocraptions. It only takes one wrong word, one wrong letter in a caption to confuse the viewer. Before the viewer can decipher the caption, the caption will move on to the next line.

Autocraptions are a big problem. They don't make sense. And one wrong word or a missing letter is enough to change the meaning of a line. Before I could figure it out, the lyrics move on.

Autocraptions are embarrassing. As you'll see later. Autocraptions give wrong information. In a video, the autocraptions said to broil on high for 45 minutes and preheat the oven.

What the audio really said was broil on high for 4 to 5 minutes and don't preheat the oven. That would be one burned item! That hurts your brand. Accessibility advocates are passionate and will boycott brands.

If I see autocraptions, I'll find something else to watch. If the company didn't think it was worth editing the captions, I don't think it's worth watching them. And finally, Harvard and MIT got sued for lack of captions. But they argued: Our videos have captions!

Pointing to the automatic captions. First, that was a lawsuit. And two, they agreed to ultimately caption their videos. Attorneys said autocaptioning is not equivalent to accurate professional captions.

After the presentation, I'm gonna show you the problem with autocraptions. Most of these are set in New York. I got excited when Hamilton came out on Disney. They did a great job with the captions, except for one thing.

The lyrics were all in italics. That's redundant when you have musical notes. Besides, italics aren't easy to read. Especially for those with reading disabilities.

Here autocraptions bungled the whole line. They said: His mother went quacking with the cousin. The correct words are: Alex got better, but his mother went quick. Moved in with a cousin.

If there is a word that's heard, it should be captioned. Here, Jerry Seinfeld appears on Larry King, talking about his iconic show. This line makes no sense. The last part was supposed to be: 75 million viewers on the last episode.

Automatic captions are a first step. The next step is to edit it. Here's a quick tip for using an app to automatically caption the video and then cleaning it up. We're going to automatically caption a video and then edit it.

First, upload the file. Then stand by to let the app do its magic. It will take a few minutes, depending on the length of the video. After it's done, open it to edit it.

Hey, y'all. Male Evan here!

Not a good caption style. Let's change that. Misspelling. The autocraptions need work.

Through the magic of editing, it's done in seconds.

Hey, y'all. Meryl Evans here.

At this point, I start playing with the timings, and I'll fix the length, as the caption is too long. When you're happy, download the file.

MERYL: Now that you know how to caption a video, is your work done? Of course not. Captioning audio is only part of the formula for awesome captions. Quality is the other half.

The reason why great captions are boring is because they let the video take the spotlight. They don't detract from the video. If I notice captions, it's a sign they're not good quality. My friend John Brooker explained it well.

Captions are like virgins. Ideally you're only thinking about them if they're wrong. Guidelines come from the DCMP Captioning Key. They're clear and easy to understand.

The FCC has closed captioning rules, and WCAG also has captioning criteria. The #Caption10 is based on my experience as someone who depends on captions. I wanted to provide several ways to capture caption best practices with these 10 rules. The caption video should be optimized.

Thanks, Thomas. He shared the link to the captioning key in the chat box. You can do an online search to find examples. The BBC is one of them.

If you're like me, you learn from examples. So here's the number one rule of awesome captions. One side contains great captions, and the other, painful captions. One thing to know is the right side has many different captions.

Because this is important. I just wanted to show you actual examples of captions. Here we go.

The most important rule of great captions is readability. When people can't read the captions, none of the other rules matter. So make sure your captions -- the text stands out from the background, the scene, and any distractions. When you post your video, be sure to add #Captioned.

So we can find it!

MERYL: Readability has four components. Size, color, font, and background. Which is the color behind the text. Captions without a background are hard to read.

When I was looking for exercise videos, I found captioned videos from two companies. Peloton won me over, because they were more readable. I promised that I would mention Manhattan. Here it is.

This is my uncle, a professor at Manhattan College. He's talking about the Veterans at Ease program. It's a very cool program. Anyway, this has a serious readability issue.

Often the captions get lost in the video. For the same reason. And I'm showing a link to the program that my uncle founded, in case anybody is interested. Here's Carrie Fisher on 30 Rock.

The captions are all in uppercase. Mixed case captions are far more readable. You may have seen some videos use karaoke-style captions. This is when the captions highlight each word in a second color as it's spoken or sung.

I've noticed a trend that some people highlight keywords in a different color. But even when the highlighted word doesn't move, it's still a problem. Check it out.

Hey, y'all. Meryl Evans here with a caption #ValueIn30 tip about colors. The best captions use one color. I know people who use a second color to emphasize words or phrases mean well.

This works great in written content. Just not in captions. You get so focused on the differently colored words that you lose the message. Also, skip the caption feature that highlights the word as it's spoken.

Everyone reads at a different speed. Let them be in control. The best captions are boring, because they create an effortless user experience. Thanks for watching and captioning.

MERYL: Even without movement, my eyes can't help but focus on the word in a different color. Try as I might, I can't read the whole caption without being drawn to the colored word. As a result, the video's message is lost. Skip captions that are karaoke style.

Stick with basic black and white captions. Simple works. This explains why they're called autocraptions.

MERYL: Hey, y'all. Meryl Evans, digital marketing pro, here to create a video so I can show you how to caption it. It would be interesting to see how bad the automatic captions are for this video. I call them autocraptions, because they're riddled with mistakes.

And they never, ever get my first and last name right! Autocraptions don't like my accent very much. It's not a British or a French accent. Rather, I have a deaf accent, because I was born hearing-free.

This video should be long enough now to do the trick. Thanks for coming and captioning your videos.

MERYL: Autocraptions are good for a few laughs, but they're not so funny when you're trying to watch the video. I often quit watching videos when the captions aren't accurate. It turns out many of us do too. This is why autocraptions are not always better than no captions.

Gremlins 2 has a scene in which the gremlins sing New York, New York. The line is completely botched. It blends two lines into one incomplete line. You may or may not have seen Taxi Driver.

But you most likely know Al Pacino's famous line -- you talking to me? Autocraptions changed that to "I'm talking to me!" While, true, he's talking to himself, that's not what he says! When you watch this next video, cover up the left side, and see what happens.

Great captions is synchronized. This means the captions follow the action on the screen. What is heard. What is said.

Yes, we can tell when the captions are out of sync. Even with the sound off. And it's dizzying. Make sure your captions follow the action on the screen.

MERYL: Now check out a synchronize fail. Here's the scene from Young Girl. The captions are out of sync here.

Thank God. Four hours 'til she's on a plane and out of my hair.

Where are they going?

Grand tour of Italy. Now that she's married, she can eat all the pasta she wants. Want to dance?

I do!

Well, I... I think I got my answer.

The answer is I love you.

MERYL: Dizzying, right? This happened more than once in the Kids Baking Championship. You know reality shows love to draw things out, to increase suspense. Pay attention to the captions and the audio to see what went wrong.

The five spice?

Unfortunately the baker leaving us today is... (suspenseful music)

Namiah.

MERYL: Did you figure it out? Caption viewers find out who's leaving a whole 8 seconds before the audio. Now this is an example of suspense done right. They drag it out at the right time.

Also, notice how they caption music.

Ladies... The final rose...

Thank you. (more dramatic music)

Thank you to Joe for catching that. The are you talking to me line was Robert De Niro, not Al Pacino. I don't know how I did that. Anyway...

Yes. Size matters. And here is why.

Hey, y'all. Meryl Evans here with a caption tip. Yes, size matters. Really, really matters in great captions!

You want to avoid having captions go one or two words at a time. So fast! That even the fastest readers can't keep up, or absorb the information. You also want to avoid the captions going all the way across multiple lines.

I've seen some go three, four, five lines long. You're so focused on reading that you miss the action on the screen. Goldilocks found the best answer. And that's the middle.

Limit captions to one or two lines and aim for the middle of the screen. So yes. Size matters in great captions.

MERYL: Remember the YouTube video where I was showing the lines. Those are the two most common problems I see in captions. Even I messed that up in my early days of captioning. Length is the difference between scanning and reading.

Short lines make it effortless to scan captions and watch the videos. Long lines force you to read. It's not instant. You're reading more, so you miss more of the video.

Videos often break these rules. More than two lines makes it hard not to lose your place. Aim for one to two lines, about 32 characters per line. For line breaking points, the Captioning Key has great examples.

The biggest one: It's nice to end and start a sentence in one line of captions. Like in this photo. I copied the link again, in case you missed the Captioning Key link. As for alignment, the important thing is to keep it consistent for the entire video.

The next clip will show you the difference. The captions of How I Met Your Mother on Hulu are terrible. They often show three or four lines at a time, and cover more of the video. The captions have terrible line breaking points and bad alignment.

Which position do you prefer? Top or bottom? In this one, you might want to hide one side for about 8 seconds and then look to the other side for the remainder.

Do you prefer top or bottom position? In captions, of course! The majority of people prefer them on the bottom. There is no scientific research or data to prove this.

For some reason, when you look at the bottom, you can see more of the video. Somehow, when captions are up top, it seems like we catch less of the video. It's almost like our eyes tend to gravitate up, rather than down.

MERYL: So which do y'all prefer? Top or bottom? Let me know in the chat box. Thank you, Jill.

Lots of bottoms here! Ooh, Thomas was really... Ha-ha! Yeah.

I can't get used to the top either. So I have conducted multiple polls, and 99% pick the bottom. Do not adjust your volume. This video has no sound, to show the importance of sound.

The left is the correct way. Right shows what happens when you don't caption sounds. Which is what happens all those times in international movies with subtitles.

This was a simple video to show the importance of sound.

MERYL: Noting silence or background music is important. One episode of a TV show went on and on without captions. I didn't have my bionic ear on. So I wondered if I was missing a voice over or a song.

Don't leave viewers wondering if the captions are messed up. The captions tell a story by letting us know the machine beeps fast and the blood pressure drops. Obviously something is tense. And this scene from Lily and Dash on Netflix, Dash is trying to talk to the customer rep.

It's clear the rep is ignoring Dash. As viewers know, there's no one on the other end of the phone. At the start of a TV show introducing the Stones, the captions and the credits or the chyron really overlap. In fact, many shows move the captions up temporarily, and then bring them back down.

Meryl Evans here, talking about credits and captions. They should never, ever fight for viewers' attention. They want to see both. As an example, I'll talk about what I do.

I'm a digital marketing pro, who works with marketing leaders on their projects and tasks. I may develop their social media marketing plan, manage it, or do social media ads. And finally, content marketing. Contact me when you need a marketing right hand gal.

Actually... I'm left-handed. Left hand gal!

MERYL: The captions move up temporarily to avoid overlapping with the title on the screen. I had to watch Law and Order SVU on Hulu instead of NBC, because the captions were messed up. Hulu is notorious for having the captions overlap the credits. Here's another example where the onscreen text has important information, but the captions cover it up!

Viewers want to see both without straining. Now let's take a look at what voice means and why it matters. I'm gonna turn the sound off for this one. The caption will tell you the story.

MERYL: Here the captions let us know if a character talks softly. You can say whoa! So many different ways, and it means different things. Lily and Dash had a voiceover.

If it weren't for the captions, we might have thought it was the same person speaking. This makes a big difference. Never want to confuse your viewers and have them wondering: Who said that? Here's a clip with a few examples of speakers.

There are times when it's not clear who is speaking on a video. Sometimes the speaker isn't on screen, or two people speak and the captions show dialogue from both in one shot. Here are two different ways the captions show this. The first clip uses a person's name.

Take a look.

Wait!

How do we know it's not the bear?

It's me. You just left me!

You weren't out there that long.

You didn't get the food?

I almost was food. I wish we had never come on this stupid trip.

Who forced you?

Gloria.

(gasping)

This next example puts captions underneath the speaker.

Pair of sense of. Ace high. Everyone, I'd like you to meet Don Lemon and Ru Paul, a pair of black Queens.

That's the third I'm you've wandered over there. What are you doing?

Letting people know who speaks the line is important.

MERYL: The video shows all three of these examples for identifying the speakers to let us know who does what. You can put the caption under the speaker when you use open captions or VTT, which allows you to control position. Here are the captions letting us know Older Ted is doing the voiceover. In this case, they can get away with all caps, but it's better to use mixed case.

Even though Titus is on the screen, we know from the captions that Kimmy is talking. Here's the last one. Most large events use scrolling captions. This can't always be avoided.

However, I've seen scrolling captions in recorded videos. Pop-on is easier. These two videos were not in sync. It was a challenge to make this.

The left is the pop-in, and the right is the scrolling.

Hey, y'all! Meryl Evans here, talking about the difference between scrolling captions and pop-in captions. Many people prefer pop-in captions because it lets people read at their own pace. The movement from the scrolling captions is distracting.

And takes away from the action on the screen. Thanks for watching and captioning.

MERYL: We've covered the ten best practices for awesome captions. Here is a recap. Readability, accuracy, sync, length, position, sound, credit, voice, speaker, and flow. Now let's put together everything we've learned.

And when an accessibility company captions these videos like Thomas Logan, this is the kind of thing I see every day. The captions are optimized or captimized. See if you can spot the difference and share your thoughts in the chat box.

Hi, everyone. I'm Thomas Logan from Equal Entry, and I'll be presenting about the 9 new proposed success criteria for WCAG 2.2. A random fact about me: I love the sound of a xylophone. (playing xylophone) also, I'm excited about Jamie Knight and Lion from the BBC's presentation on Cognitive Accessibility for VR.

I'm sure the team has done amazing research, and I can't wait to learn from them. See you there in March!

MERYL: Shorter line lengths. Yay! Anybody else? The position makes a huge difference.

The original -- shorter. Xylophone sound. Parsing into sentences helps. The original had long lines.

Less than ideal breaking points, and ended and started sentences in the same line. The Captimized version fixed all of these, plus put sound on its own line. You've probably seen some embarrassing screen shots of bad captions. The Daily Mail shared this from a New Zealand talk show, that showed up all over Twitter.

I can't even read the captions out loud, because it's embarrassing! Hilary Barry, the TV host, tweeted the picture and wrote: Salmon! I love salmon! Do you want your company or brand to be featured on Twitter like this?!

So yes, quality captions matter!! Besides captioning videos, here are some action items you can take away. What can we do to get more captioned videos out there? If you see a video that should be captioned, ask.

Many companies will oblige. If you see a captioned video, leave a comment thanking the creators for captioning. And encourage them to use #Captioned, to help expand their video's reach, or thank them if they used the hashtag. Next time you post your video online, use #Captioned.

It's a unique hashtag, because it doesn't tell you the topic of the video, but rather, it has captions. One of the biggest barriers to captioning is not knowing what to do. Share captioning how-to resources. Feel free to connect with me at [email protected].

I'll add it to the chat box. Connect with me on Twitter. At MerylKEvans. On LinkedIn.

I think I'm connected through a lot of you already. But here it is! Which is LinkedIn.com/in/Meryl. And finally, the Caption Guide has everything -- or most everything -- that's at Meryl.net/captions.

Thank you for your time! And I want to extend a Texas-sized thank you and yeehaw to a11ynyc, for having me. I can take your questions. We have a few minutes left.

But maybe everybody is gonna be willing to hang out a little bit longer. So go ahead and add your questions to the chat box.

THOMAS: Great. Thank you so much, Meryl. That was an awesome presentation. And you had me and lots of people laughing with some of your illustrative examples.

Which I think are very memorable. And helpful. For understanding. I wanted to...

Right before... Please, as Meryl said, type your questions, or if you would like, you can also... Excuse me! Come on to video.

And ask your question, as Meryl mentioned. We would love for you to ask your question too with your video. So it's up to you. Either type your question, or raise your hand and we will call on you to ask a question.

I did want to acknowledge and point out just from my observation of watching all of Meryl's presentations -- Meryl and I have worked together very recently on automatic -- autocraption projects, where just in one minute of video, we showed how poor automatic translations work. For someone that has a voice or a different pronunciation style... And so I want to also acknowledge Mirabai Knight, again. I was watching the captions for this entire presentation.

They were amazing. So I'm also going to paste into the chat one of the other presentations we've had in the past, at a11ynyc, is Why Human Captioning. But I think tonight's presentation or today's presentation for you -- it really illustrates that. And we've seen that very recently, in a project we worked on together.

That autocraptions... You know, they really are even more automatically crap when you're not having, maybe, the standard voice that the model was trained on. So I think tonight... So much thanks.

So we'll start taking questions. I think the first one we have... Do you have the ones from Stacy? On YouTube?

No, sorry. I have one from YouTube first, that I'll ask you. And then you can get into the chat ones. But...

From Thuy... I remember the first time I captioned a video, I got so fed up with typing everything. Do you think that's something that comes with time? That's a question we got from YouTube.

MERYL: So actually, it works really well. Because I just tested it recently. I copied a huge... It was actually an Equal Entry webinar.

I took a plain text file with the script. And pasted it into YouTube. And let it sense the timings, and it got it almost perfect. So the only reason I can think of that it may not be working...

It could be poor quality audio. Or maybe somebody is talking too fast. And they're not pausing enough to give the video a chance to figure out the timing. So...

Give it a try. Make a short clip. With a short script. And test it out.

And see how that goes.

THOMAS: Okay. And we have a question from Christina Babcock. Should a sound be captioned? If it can be seen?

For instance, if we see the door being closed, should it be captioned [door closes]?

MERYL: No. It should only be captioned if it's heard. So... And of course...

If it's seen but not heard, that might be an item for audio description, which is a different ballgame. And just as important.THOMAS: So another question I had for you, Meryl, from the part where you showed the placement of the captions, and you showed moving the captions to the top or the bottom and moving those around, what file format is that? And is that something that you can do in YouTube? Or is that something you do in a different tool, to move the captions?

MERYL: The VTT file is a text file. You can't do it in YouTube. What you can do is create the VTT in YouTube, and then edit it, in a text editor, to control the positioning. So...

If you go to Meryl.net, you can see an example. I hope I got that right. You can go see an example in action. And show the placement.

Yeah.

THOMAS: Thank you. So you have a recommendation for SubTitleEdit from Joly. It's a great free tool for editing captions. And from Dylan Fox, do you think we'll need a new file format for captions in virtual or augmented reality?

MERYL: It's a great question. I'm not surprised that you asked it, Dylan. I've been thinking about this, ever since we had our SR Access last month. And I'm being very open-minded about it.

And trying not to be too stuck on my caption rules. Because I know VR and AR are totally different environments. So... I don't know what the researchers are coming up with yet.

SRT and VTT are great. Because they're text-based. But we have a lot of things to figure out with it. I'm figuring it out too.

THOMAS: All right. So if anyone else has a question or if you raise your hand and you want to come on video, we'll be happy to have you ask your question on video. Question from Sergeant Pepper. Will the links be shared for the presentation after the video?

It would be handy to have the full list.

MERYL: It slipped up. Yes. The resources will be shared. We'll either put it in the comments of a11ynyc, or we'll do a recap on Equal Entry's blog.

There will be a recap. And I'll capture all the links. You can also get my PowerPoint right now. In case you missed it at the beginning, it is here.

So it's Meryl.net/a11yNYC.

THOMAS: Question from Lauren. In the creation of a language learning website, for example, a video with French dialogue, for an English speaking learner, would you suggest that the noise descriptions are in the language the learner speaks, or the language they are learning?

MERYL: Oh, that's a great question. Okay. So... If they're watching captions...

The captions will be reflecting whatever the audio is saying. And usually... It's been so long since I've seen a video teaching a language. But generally it should...

Okay. I'm trying to keep this simple. I know what I want to say. But just to put it in words...

So if the video is English, and it's teaching French, but it's an English-based video, the sounds will most likely be in English. Because that's how the video is created. And anything spoken will be in whatever language they're speaking. It's kind of a tricky one.

But... Generally, let me see... I'm trying to think of a good example to help me here. So...

Okay. I turn on my TV. I'm in Texas. I turn on my TV.

And I'm watching a show to learn Spanish. The sounds should be in English. Because I am in America. I'm in Texas.

Where English is the language. So it should show up in English. And then whatever they're teaching will show up in Spanish. I hope that makes sense.

Clear as mud?

THOMAS: Meryl, thank you. We have another question from YouTube, from Ken ST18. Is there a minimum font size or an ideal font size for captions?

MERYL: Well, if it's closed captions, you don't have to worry about that. That's the best thing about closed captions. You don't have to worry about font, color, or size. Because it's done for you.

And it changes as you change the video. But if you're doing open captions, because of places like Twitter or Instagram... Or whatever... Then it's hard to give you a size, because it depends on what font you're using.

You know, I try to use... I'm trying to remember the name of the font I use typically... But it looks very similar to the default captions. And usually I use 24 point, if I remember right.

So... The best way to measure is to look at the captions. Right now. And try to match it, as best as you can, for open captions.

But just remember: When you're showing it on social media, or whatever, people may have it... They may not make the screen larger. So it's gonna be very small. So I would suggest creating a clip, a short one, and testing them out, before you start making more and more videos and longer videos.

And see how it looks.

THOMAS: I'll have one other comment/question. I observed for my father's television... So hardware television... The captions were frequently placed up at the top of the screen.

And it seemed like a choice from that specific television. Like, if you were watching the same show on a different device, they wouldn't be placed there. But I was wondering if you knew anything about that. That's a hypothesis.

But I was surprised for his TV that the captions seemed to be more frequently at the top. And there wasn't a setting or any control for that. So I was just wondering if you knew anything about hardware devices, making that choice.

MERYL: Did you play the same video on a different device, and the captions were at the bottom?

THOMAS: Yeah.

MERYL: That's interesting. I haven't heard about that. It being a specific model or brand name. I haven't seen that.

When I watch it on my different TVs, it's always at the bottom. But... Occasionally, like The Last Dance, the documentary, when I was trying to watch it when it was on air, all the captions kept showing up, on top. But it was not my TV.

Because somebody else reported the same problem. Thankfully, by the time it came out on Netflix, it was back at the bottom where it belonged, and I could watch it there. I could not watch it when it was all up top. I felt like I was missing the action on the screen.