Interpreter: If you create video and audio content
or host events,
there are two reasons to care about providing
high quality, same language captioning and transcription.
The first is obvious,
that there are millions of people like myself,
who get accessibility through captions.
But another reason
is that you will reach a much larger audience
and increase your return on investment.
80% of people who use captions are not deaf.
Captions help foreign language learners,
people in gyms, or bars, or sound sensitive environments,
and assist when the speaker has a strong accent,
or when content is complicated and difficult to understand.
Captions increase the viewership by 40%.
90% of videos with captions are watched to completion.
Digiday states that
85% of Facebook videos are viewed in mute mode,
so captioning has become a necessity.
Growing up, I didn't have captioning access
until I was in eighth grade.
That's when my dad brought home a box
called a captioning decoder.
We were amazed by this magic box
that made captions show up on almost all the TV channels.
Now captioning support is included in all TV models
and video players,
and there's no need for external decoders anymore.
Captions are now not limited even to TV and videos,
they can also be provided in real-time
for breaking news, webinars, events,
classes, work meetings, and so on.
Once I was given access to captioned material,
my life completely changed
and new worlds opened up for me.
But I'm not alone.
There are over 48 million deaf and hard of hearing people
in United States.
And over 466 million worldwide.
The number is increasing rapidly as well,
especially because the number one cause of hearing loss now
is constant exposure to loud noises.
Captions also helped me master English as my third language.
Even my parents, who have perfect hearing,
love captions because English is not their native language.
Quality is critical
when you're considering captions.
While there are now many speech technologies
that can translate automatically
spoken words into captions,
they're often not accurate.
Many deaf people call them "craptions".
(Laughter)
Under ideal conditions,
the accuracy rate is usually somewhere between 80 and 90%.
And it gets even worse with complex content,
or accents, background noise,
when speakers are speaking too fast,
or overlap each other.
And bad captions are not better than nothing.
Garbled captions are hard to read.
And it's just like listening to garbled audio.
Caption errors make it hard to understand
or retain any information.
Poor captions affect your SEO, search engine optimization,
and decrease your CPM, your clicks per mille,
for videos and your ROI, return on investment.
Google is deaf like me
and doesn't like videos with auto-captioning,
so it just does not index those videos.
So Google penalizes producers
for turning on the auto-captions
instead of actually adding proper captioning themselves.
Even if a machine could translate
every spoken word to captions accurately,
it still cannot follow certain quality guidelines.
For example, you may see text exactly as it's heard,
for example this:
Lets eat grandma.
(Laughter)
Now, does that mean that we should go ahead
and consume grandma,
or that we should dine with her?
It's not clear, right?
Now that's much better.
(Laughter)
So proper grammar and punctuation are critical
for optimal experience in reading captions.
Just like speech intonations are.
Quality guidelines are long and complex,
so I'm just sharing a few basic tips with you today.
Transcripts and captions need to be verbatim
They need to follow proper grammatical rules,
include non-speech elements,
use upper and lower case letters,
have good font size and color contrast,
and translate profanity --
word for word,
assuming it's not bleeped out in the audio.
Captions and transcripts need to be completed
before you publish or share videos and podcasts.
So everyone can enjoy them at the same time.
And if you advertise in advance
that events will have real-time captions,
you will get a larger audience.
With advances in technologies,
it is much easier, faster,and cheaper
to create captions now more than ever before.
For example, YouTube offers a great free tool
to create and edit captions.
You can save and download your captions as an SRT caption file
and import it onto Vimeo, Facebook,
or other video platforms
that offer captioning support.
Here's a short example.
So you can see how easy it is.
Yes, it's really easy.
And you can clean up the auto captions if you like,
or you can create them from scratch.
Just please do not turn on auto captions
and just leave them as is.
And please add video captions
on all platforms that you use,
and couple those captions with transcripts for videos,
because those are useful for people who cannot see the video
or that want to skim the information.
If your organization can do so,
consider hiring an experienced specialist
who is familiar with quality standards and guidelines.
They can produce your captions and transcripts faster
and make them look more professional and easy to read.
The costs for transcripts and captions
vary from a dollar all the way to $10 or $15 per minute.
And the rates really depend
on experience and the skills of the vendor,
the audio quality,
the content complexity, among other factors.
Low cost may result in bad quality.
Some vendors may use auto-captioning themselves
or unskilled labor
that will result in low caption quality
and end up wasting your money.
Always review the selected vendor's prior work
to assess the quality.
If you have budget limitations,
there are some creative ways to find money
like asking sponsors to cover expenses.
I work with media producers, corporations,
educational institutions, business owners, event organizers,
and I help make their audio, video, and events accessible
at a reasonable cost.
There's some guidance and information along with my personal story
that can be found in my book.
If nobody asks for speech to text access,
that does not mean that there's no demand.
It needs to be provided for all types of aural information
even without a prior request.
High quality, same language captions and transcripts
are good for business
and a necessity for millions of people.
Let's think outside the ears!
(Laughter)
Let's caption everything!
Get your message to more people.
Thank you.
(Applause)