This project was both incredibly rewarding and frustrating at the same time. I was able to experience firsthand the work required to add subtitles to videos that have none and learning that it is not a quick task. It was very labor intensive and required a lot of quality check on my part to make the subtitles as close to accurate as I could.
It took me a few days to find a video that I felt would benefit from subtitles and would be interesting to a modern-day viewer. I decided to use a video that I stumbled on another YouTube user’s channel ricsil2037.
Original Video
I felt the video was a good choice since people today would find it interesting to watch an example of how special effects were created for radio shows back in the 1930’s plus it is a video that is relatively short, so a majority of people would watch it rather than see it as too long.
Radio shows were common before the 1950’s since TV’s were not available to the public, so the radio was a person’s primary form of entertainment in those days. Since the video was made from a ~1930’s radio show according to the original source, the subtitles had several errors.
After uploading the original video to my personal YouTube channel on Thursday and downloading the autogenerated subtitles in the .srt file which were not available until Friday afternoon when I checked.
I read the file and watch the autogenerated CC and decided that a viewer who is hearing impaired would get completely lost if they were only able to read the subtitles.
I spent on average 2-4 hours each day trying to manually fix the .srt file for upload while trying to guesstimate the correct time in the video to sync the speech too. This was meticulous work since I am a perfectionist plus doing something like this, I want to make it as accurate as possible otherwise an individual who is hearing impaired may not understand the video.
The video had 106 views after I published it publicly, which averages out to approx. 12 hours that I re-watched the video trying to improve the subtitles I had taken ownership for.
The tools provided by YouTube were adequate for me or any person to add subtitles to a video, however the tools do make it both difficult and a considerable time investment. I see this has the biggest obstacle for accessibility is that the tools required to make videos, websites, etc. accessible are fairly primitive in that it was completely manual in making sure the speech to text and timing was manually inputted.
The interface for the tools WAS NOT user friendly and anyone who didn’t have accessibility or subtitles as a deliverable or requirement could easily become frustrated. This would result in a majority of people viewing the auto-generated subtitles as sufficient for accessibility when in fact it is hardly sufficient.
Video with Subtitles
Overall, I am happy with my results since I believe anyone who watches my video can get a good understanding of what is happening in the story, both in terms of storyline and what is happening in the video.
I also gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about what is required to add accessibility to our media and that it is not as simple as adding an alt attribute to a div tag. This brings home my belief that accessibility is an area that needs to be prioritized at the beginning of a project to streamline and make it relatively hassle free to incorporate.