Captions for our YouTube videos

Thanks to a community effort from Silverfish, Jo-shadow, and djscrat, all of our Overgrowth videos have now been captioned!

Normally it is very difficult to add subtitles to a video because you need to annotate your transcript to tell it when to display every single caption. However, last week, Google enabled a new feature that lets you upload a simple transcript and using voice recognition, it automatically times the captions for you.

To view the captions, simply toggle the "CC" button.

Captions are great because now people who are hearing impaired or people who don't have audio enabled can still get the gist of the videos (minus the awesome beat boxing). Furthermore, Google automatically translates the captions for people in other countries and indexes them in order to help video search results.

To help coordinate the transcriptions, we used EtherPad, an awesome collaborative text editor. To view a timelapse of four people simultaneously transcribing our most complicated video, the 7 minute map editor tutorial, click this link. Press the play button to start the timelapse. It is amazing how fast things go when multiple people are working in parallel. Many keyboards make light work!

If you notice any timing issues or typos, please let us know and we can easily fix them. Also, it would be great if someone would like to volunteer to transcribe our design tours!

Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already.