Captions are the text equivalent of the spoken word. Captioning your YouTube videos not only makes your videos accessible to people who are hard of hearing but it also enables viewers who do not have English as their first language to better understand the content of your video. Let us also not forget the office workers who wile away time slouching at their office desks viewing videos in silent mode yet looking ever so busy.

I have been asked numerous times as to the best way to caption YouTube videos hence this blog post. When I initially started to caption videos, I used the ever popular MAGpie software but found that captioning YouTube videos proved to be extremely tedious with MAGpie. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools available on the web that makes the captioning process a whole lot easier. Below is a review of the tool that I use CaptionTube:

CaptionTube

It has taken a while but Google have finally come up with their own tool for adding YouTube captions. Unfortunately it does not integrate with YouTube as fluidly as we may want it to but neverthless works efficiently as a caption editor once you get past the learning curve. It allows you to connect directly to your YouTube account and have access to your videos within CaptionTube. Once the captions are created though, you will need to export the file and then upload the file to your YouTube account, this is where the fluidity is lost. Add a functionality to automatically add the caption to the YouTube video and I think we are on to a winner app. CaptionTube is what I used to caption the LSBU YouTube videos

Screenshot of captiontube

Other tools that I have found useful include:

• Subtitle Horse
• dotSub
• Easy YouTube caption creator