Are you presenting online?
Are you sharing the replays with attendees?
Captions increase the accessibility of our recordings, making it easier for attendees with hearing issues, audio/tech glitches, and non-English speakers to follow our ideas.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about embedded captions with Sue Griffey.
(Embedded captions means that the captions are “stuck” or “burned” inside the video file itself, not as an extra button that viewers have to remember to click.)
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
[00:00:00] I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go.
And in this video, you’ll learn about embedded captions from Sue Griffey.
All right. This is a, a progression of how I’ve done in captioning as Ann, working with Ann over the last four years, made me more and more aware of accessibility. And LinkedIn also, who were a couple of years ago, really focused on making sure we caption everything.
Um, I took to the opportunity when I do mentor time, and most of these slides are from the half hour professional development topic I do twice a month, um, to explore how to use My tools and the best tool was Descript because I could use it for editing and it also embeds captions. I wanted them embedded because people I work with globally told me they don’t always have the opportunity to turn on captions.
People get confused in YouTube about where to go [00:01:00] and that way I knew whatever was already done. So, this is now just the last, I would say, four to six months in, because this is a screenshot, and traditionally in the bottom of the screen I would put the footer for whatever reference I was extracting from.
And this is when Descript went from one kind of caption to All sorts of captions. They now have a range of them, and this was the default one. It’s huge, but it was like, I just got to get it done. So I did get it done. Not pretty, but it was there, and I do hear people tell me it’s useful. Then I realized I could take the time to adjust the captions, but what was bothering me was the fact that it overwrites things.
Yes, there was a lot here on this slide, but it What I was saying is this woman has a way to evaluate your biases. You can go see it later. I brought it to [00:02:00] Ann and to Office Hours to say, I really am needing to have captions in a way, and I’m thinking that I need to adjust my, my band at the bottom to make it wide enough just for the captions.
So, I’m I told Ann that I would try it out and then I came to office hours with captions and discovered that, um, with moving it around, I have a 1. 1 inch band at the bottom and Descript will let you do a single line, but sometimes it pushes you to a double line anyway. Add. a readable size. I think this was 36.
And Ann said to me, Sue, wouldn’t it be great if you could, I thought first you were saying, Ann, wouldn’t it be great if you could make the gray match each section, and I have three sections, a blue section, a green, a red section, and a green section. I know, well, I realized that when we talked. You were [00:03:00] saying make it transparent, and could you make the, the, font match what’s the font you use on screen.
Descript lets you change the size of it and it has some fonts, but this font was the closest I found to my font. Um, so this is what I now can do with Descript. I still have one troubleshooting thing. This is with a transparent background, Ann, but it still sort of puts a block around it. It’s like it’s a little darker.
And I don’t know if I’m choosing the wrong transparent and I haven’t had enough time to futz with it. But it now comes up as by itself. Anything that I need to for URLs are now above the red band. And I’m really happy with how it looks. It doesn’t look sloppy. And my, my, basically my available space is in the white.
So I don’t always have full bleed photos unless I’m doing a, a, uh, a [00:04:00] slide separator. But this is how it is, and I’m thrilled with it. I love this progression. I love the idea of just making the footer of the slide. What did you say? 1. 1 inches? 1. 1 inches. Measurement. Yep. Is that set up in your SlideMaster?
It is. Can I show you my SlideMaster? I’m so proud of it. I’d love to see it. Everything matches. Everything’s labeled except the dark red. I thought I had renamed that green, but yeah, I’m so happy with it and it makes me so restful now because I was trying to use a different one for teaching and a different one.
Now I’m like, nope, just one set. So, yeah, that’s, it’s all in there, everything’s set, and no problem with, the only thing I have to do, Descript doesn’t let you set an automatic setting for your captions, you have to choose the caption, I have to change the, um, size, I change the size from 50 down to 28, which is what I want.
[00:05:00] What most of my, this slide, um, the last slide I showed you was. It comes out looking professional and I can manage just fine. Can you talk me through, like, what do I need to do to do the embedded caption magic that you’ve done? I literally don’t know where to click. Yeah, go to the far right. And the second from the bottom choice in that panel, this is called Underlord, has all these helpful things.
And I use the classic one. It’s about two thirds of the way down below the yellow. I use classic. So, click on it so I can show you what comes up in the panel. So, you see it inserts the box, and you can adjust the size of the box. You can move it all the way down, you can make it smaller, you can make it wider.
So click on the, click on the box itself[00:06:00]
and it should, I’m trying to remember where it comes up, maybe it’s, there it is, yeah. So you see it automatically comes up in white and 50 with man rope whatever. So click on the white. Now that’s where I was choosing the transparency next to the Great. To the right of that. I chose that as transparent.
That was the lightest thing I could find. Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting then for me to think through what’s the opposite of that I have to do, because these aren’t slides, this is Excel, so I need the filled background. Right. And then it’s like, where does it fit with the webcam? Because a lot of times in the editing, I’ll go from full screen to the inset webcam and back again to keep it interesting.
Yeah. I think this webcam is set to be Whatever percent in Camtasia, like 25%. So when I do make it small, it is consistently that size. So I literally didn’t even know this was [00:07:00] all possible. This is so fascinating. You move the box over, make it wide, make it small. Yeah. Um, but then let me show you, hit the classic button.
under classic, and that’s where you get the border and the background. So background is where I then, um, yeah. But yeah, that’s your fill color, so you want to change that to black, uh, to, you want to leave that white or whatever. Oh, you’re purple. I don’t think I want to do purple. I think that would be too hard to read.
Um, I’m just noticing they have an upper in here. Oops, I didn’t mean to click on that red. Um, black? No, white. White. White on black. Just go down to the white button. Go to the color panel down below and hit the white button. This is my font color. I don’t know. Font. Black font. Okay, then go to background.
Yeah. White background. [00:08:00] With maybe a hair. Transparency?
Nope.
Yeah, you’ve got, it’s just bolded around, it’s just white around the day, the text itself, not the whole box. Active word, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, there’s, I mean, it’s fun to play with all of these. Yeah. I’m working with someone now who’s neurodivergent and I chatted with her the other day about what’s not working for her in the course, and she loves captions, but I said, do you want it where it highlights each word?
And she said, no, that would be too distracting, so. Do export at the top left. Yep. And then You hit video. I export the transcript first and then I export videos. So, but that’s just me. I like [00:09:00] to have a word doc of everything because people often want to go back and see what the actual wording was that we struggled through on their CVs or whatever.
I think Descript is still the captioning tool. It is. I don’t think there’s one that has more features and more correctness than this one out there. New tech gets invented all the time, but. If anybody here wants to try one, Descript is the starting point. They have a free trial, too. I forget how much it is after that, but I’m sure the site spells out the different levels of subscriptions.
Thank you so much, Sue. You’re welcome. It’s fun to geek out on this.
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