In previous posts, I’ve written about how to make videos accessible with Universal Subtitles or with CaptionTube. And having decided that Universal Subtitles provides the better interface for creating captions, I also published a screencast explaining how to use the service. There’s one small hitch, though: if your video is hosted on YouTube, where many potential viewers will be able to find it, but your captions are hosted at Universal Subtitles, then your YouTube viewers won’t be able to take advantage of the captions you’ve created. What to do? Fortunately, it’s easy enough to download the captions you’ve created and upload them to your YouTube video. Let me show you.

This tutorial assumes you’ve already created captions using Universal Subtitles (remember the screencast?). The steps below show you how to download them from Universal Subtitles and then upload them to the YouTube…

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To follow up on my earlier post about UniversalSubtitles.org, I’ve created a screencast demonstrating how to use it.

If you have any trouble watching the above embedded video, you can try going directly to the relevant page at the Universal Subtitles site (where you’ll still be able to watch the video with captions), or to the video’s page on Vimeo (where there will be no captions). If you don’t need captions, I recommend watching the video at Vimeo in HD and with the full-screen option enabled.

It’s worth noting that until you download them, the captions you create at Universal Subtitles are found only on the Universal Subtitles site. However, as I mention at the end of the video, once you’ve downloaded your captions–if you choose to–you can then upload them into YouTube. A full explanation of how to do …

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If you create videos to share online, then it’s a good idea to add subtitles so that your audience can include as many different people as possible, including those who don’t understand the original language of the video as well as those with hearing impairment. It’s not terribly difficult to add subtitles, but it is time consuming. I know this because I’ve spent some time transcribing interviews and testing different methods for getting the work done. After experimenting with a paid service for transcribing videos I’ve been working on, I began to think about what it would take to create a tool that would allow people to volunteer their transcription efforts, perhaps just one segment of video (or audio) at a time.

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