Closed captioning is a valuable tool for making your video content accessible to a wider audience. It can also be used to transcribe audio for those who are hard of hearing or have difficulty understanding spoken English and that is why social media platforms like Facebook offer the option to add them to your videos. This guide will show you how to create and add closed captions to your Facebook videos.
What Are Closed Captions?
Closed captions are a type of text that appears on screen to provide a transcription of the audio for a video. They can be used for those who are hard of hearing or have difficulty understanding spoken English. Closed captions can also be useful for viewers who are watching a video in a noisy environment.
Why Did Facebook Add a Closed Captions Feature?
Facebook recognizes that closed captions are a valuable tool for making video content accessible to a wider audience. They also believe that captioning can transcribe audio for those who are hard of hearing or have difficulty understanding spoken English. The option of adding closed captioning on Facebook videos provide a great way to ensure that your content is accessible to as many people as possible.
Ways to Add Closed Captions to Your Facebook Videos
1. Use a Third-party Captioning Service
There are a number of companies that offer captioning services. To use a third-party service, you will need to provide them with your video file and pay a fee for their services.
2. Use Facebook’s Automatic Captioning Feature
Facebook’s automatic captioning is free to use, but it is not as accurate as a human-generated caption file. To use Facebook’s automatic captioning, you will need to upload a video with audio in English.
Once you have your caption file, you can upload it to Facebook using the video upload interface. When you upload your video, you will see an option to “add captions.” Click this button and select your caption file from your computer.
Facebook will display the captions on your video by default, but viewers can turn them off if they prefer. To change the way that Facebook displays your captions, click the “Edit” button on your video and select “Captions.”
From here, you can choose to display the captions on the left, right, or bottom of the video. You can also adjust the font size, color, and background color of the captions.
3. Write Your Own Captions
- To transcribe the captions yourself, select “Write.”
- Then, frame-by-frame, edit the text by selecting each box.
- Finally, be sure to hit “Save draft” when finished; this will return you to the main video screen.
To Upload Your Own File
- You will require an .srt file.
- it is important to save the Facebook file in this format: “filename.en_US.srt”.
For all options, select “Save” to publish on the main video screen.
On Your Own Page
- You cannot utilize automatic captioning for personal pages, but you can include captions by using an .srt file.
- You can upload videos to Facebook by selecting the “Photo/Video” option near the top of your newsfeed.
- Mount the video and ensure your settings are correct, then share it.
- To add captions, select “edit video” next to the comments box and upload an .srt file.
What Types of Closed Captioning Can Be Added to Facebook?
Facebook supports two types of caption files:
1. Timed Text Markup Language (TTML): This is the most common type of caption file and is supported by most captioning services.
2. SubRip Text (SRT): SRT files are less common, but they can be created using free captioning software like Jubler.
All different types of closed captioning are important and have their own benefits depending on the situation.
Conclusion
Adding closed captions to your Facebook videos is a great way to make your content more accessible to a wider audience. Closed captions can provide a transcript of the audio for those who are hard of hearing or have difficulty understanding spoken English. They can also be useful for viewers who are watching a video in a noisy environment. So, next time you upload a video to Facebook, be sure to add closed captions!
