YouTube's Audio Transcription

I'm attending The Future of Reading conference at RIT next week. (Side note: Margaret Attwood is the Keynote speaker. I love her stuff and am thrilled to be seeing her!).  The conference is being conducted by the School of Print Media. The program looks really exciting and I am eagerly looking forward to attending.

One thing that wasn't very exciting is that the organizers have posted videos to YouTube. They weren't professionally captioned and only used the new captioning feature in YouTube. And the results? Terrible! The captions are so far from the spoken words as to be almost completely gibberish. There is no way that a person relying on captions could understand what this video was about at all. I'm disappointed -- I was hoping this would be an inexpensive way to get content captioned. Don't rely on the automatic transcribing feature on YouTube to make your video accessible.

Late addition: I heard from one of the organizers and they are planning to create captions for this video. Good for them! But my main point still stands: Don't count on this as a way to make your content accessible.

And now more: I got the following email from the posters of the video.

futureofreading has replied to your comment on Future of Reading Symposium Social Media Tutorial:@claredygert Hi Clare. We had to wait several hours for YouTube's machine transcription. We have corrected the captioning and it now work's properly.

And it does seem to be working better. I guess the final lesson to be sure to check your video to make sure the transcription is actually working!