How I Edit and Caption My Videos as a Deaf Person
Have you ever wondered how a (mostly) oral deaf person edits and captions their own speaking videos? After all, it sounds strange for one to do so if they can’t hear and understand themselves very well, right?
I’ve been on YouTube for over 10 years now. I started as a makeup influencer before switching to a more lifestyle genre. I primarily spoke about being a mainstreamed deaf person—and trying to find my identity and a deaf community (as well as accessibility). This, of course, included talking about captions and advocating for YouTubers to properly caption their videos.
Because I did not grow up signing—I spoke English—my videos were in spoken English. Filming was easy, but editing was hard. Captioning my videos was even harder than editing them. Sometimes I had a script but, most of the time, I didn’t. Even if I listened to a line 10 times, I could still get words wrong. When community contribution was a thing on YouTube, I often had a volunteer caption my videos for me. For a few years, I had a sponsor who would caption my videos in exchange for 1-2 videos a month on their Facebook page. Unfortunately, community contribution is no longer a thing.
Currently, I use Adobe Premiere Pro’s automatic captioning feature to automatically caption my videos. I grab their file and upload it to YouTube, editing any mistakes that the software made. This is a process I recommend for everyone, using the auto captions as a base. It saves so much time.
On Premiere, you have the option to generate a transcript and turn that into captions. You can edit the captions in the program, especially if you’re creating open captions, or you can do what I do and save the SRT file, upload it to YouTube, and edit on there.
YouTube also generates automatic captions. Those can be edited to become more accessible.
This process is so much easier and faster because most of the work is already done for the creator. All that’s needed is to make sure all the words are correct and fix grammar and punctuation for accessibility purposes.
Recently, there have been some innovations for Deaf creators who primarily sign. In this case, as I’m American, I will be talking about American Sign Language (ASL). Sign-Speak is a Deaf-owned business that just launched their ASL to captions software. You can record yourself signing for up to a minute and then edit the captions as needed.
Finally being able to have access to hearing aids changed the game for me. Ten years ago, my hearing was better than it is now. Not great, but I could do more without assistive devices. I actually did not have hearing aids for the majority of my life, only having recently gotten them for the first time in August 2021.
When I got my hearing aids, it changed everything for me. They had Bluetooth streaming technology. The first time I tried it, I heard and understood so much more. Editing became more of a breeze, as did captioning. It wasn’t perfect, no, as hearing aids don’t make you hear like a hearing person, but it was so much clearer than with headphones. (For the record, hearing aids do not work for all deaf people.)
I don’t know how I’d be doing if I didn’t have them. Content creation still comes with moments of frustration, but there is no way I’d be able to or want to go back to the routine I had before.
There are still moments when I have no idea what I’m saying. I usually replace a word with (indistinct) and hope someone catches it and writes the correct word in the comments, then I go back in and fix it.
When I ask for people to make their videos accessible with captions, I’m often met with being told that it’s too hard or too time consuming. As a creator myself, I understand that. As a deaf creator, I understand that even more because providing accessibility is two times harder and time consuming than it would be for a hearing person. My hope is that by sharing my journey with readers, everyone knows how important it is to make content accessible. If a Deaf creator is doing so, why can’t hearing creators?
Rikki Poynter (she/her) is a disabled (deaf, chronic pain and fatigue) content creator, writer, public speaker, and accessibility consultant. For a decade now, she has been talking about her journey growing up deaf and mainstreamed while dipping her toes into finding a Deaf identity. She is based in Omaha, Nebraska.
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