Can You Hear Me Now?

The most common disability among Unitarian Universalists is hearing loss. When we post a recording of our worship service on our website, we have another opportunity to be inclusive of people with hearing loss.

If you post an audio only recording of a sermon, post a transcript of it, too. Kasey Kruser, of the UUA Web Team, points out that not only will it be accessible to someone with hearing loss, it will also be accessible to someone who doesn’t have an earbud with them or doesn’t have the software to play it. And, it makes it show up in internet searches!

If you post a video recording, you can use the automatic captioning that YouTube does. But, this automatic captioning often gets it wrong, and can distort your meaning. Always watch the video with the captions on and the sound turned off before you upload it.

The Rev. Barbara Meyers, whose Mental Health Matters series is fully captioned, offers this advice:

YouTube has a utility that helps a lot with captions. You prepare a text file with the exact text spoken in the video, and upload it to YouTube. The utility will automatically figure out where to place the captions. You can check what they did and make changes if necessary. This set of captions can be selected from the CC on the bottom of the YouTube window. 

This is all done from the Uploads menu of the YouTube Video Manager selectable from the user’s Dashboard.  It has to be done by the person who has uploaded the video to YouTube.

Whether it's a transcript or captions, if the sermon is not preached from a manuscript someone will need to create one after the fact, or take the time to make corrections when using speech to text software.  When you do, many more people will be able to hear you.

To learn more about closed captioning, visit YouTube's support page at Add Subtitles and Closed Captions and Caption Action 2: Internet Closed Captioning.

- Suzanne Fast