If you’ve been searching for quality closed captioned WordPress video tutorials, we’ve got some great news for you!
WP101 is proud to announce that our WordPress 101 tutorial videos are now closed captioned for the hearing impaired, helping even more people to have equal access to our WordPress training resources.
Ensuring that more people have access to our online learning resources for WordPress is extremely important to us. We’ve had many requests over the years to provide closed captioning for our videos. But until recently it’s been a daunting technological challenge, particularly given our commitment to continually update our videos with each new release of WordPress.
Thankfully, this is one area where technology is rapidly improving, making it possible for us to finally create closed captioned WordPress video tutorials. Our favorite screencast recording tool, ScreenFlow, now supports the creation of closed captions during the recording process.
We’ve also recently partnered with Amara — a leader in the captioning and transcription space — to create transcriptions and caption files for our videos by real, live humans, rather than automated or machine-transcribed files.
These tools make it possible for us to deliver closed captions for our videos within just a few days of releasing new videos on our site.
Will this affect our “always-up-to-date” guarantee?
Since we launched in 2008, we’ve updated and re-recorded our entire video series for every major release of WordPress — a whopping 18 times so far! We’ve always released our newly-updated videos the same day WordPress has shipped new versions.
Currently, the process of adding closed captions to our videos takes 4-8 business days. Our goal remains to release new videos on the same day as future releases of WordPress. We’re working to streamline our production process so we can continue to deliver future videos — with captions — as quickly as possible. But if we miss our deadline by a day or two, we feel that’s an acceptable trade-off to ensure we can continue to provide closed captioned WordPress tutorial videos for even more people in the future.
What about the WP101 Plugin?
We’ve got you covered! If you use our WP101 Plugin to provide our WordPress tutorial videos to your clients in their own dashboard, you’re already covered! Starting today, the videos used in the WP101 Plugin are also closed captioned. So be sure to inform your clients!
What’s next?
We’ve still got some work to do. We’re in the process of updating our tutorial videos for the Yoast SEO plugin. When we release those newly-updated videos, they will also be closed captioned. And some of our oldest videos will also be updated in the coming weeks, so we’ll hold off on closed captioning those videos until they’re updated.
Translations, anyone?
Closed captioning our videos will also enable us to do something we’ve not been able to do until now — translate our videos into other languages via subtitles! So, stay tuned for more on that front in the coming weeks.
We hope this helps to make a huge difference in the lives and education of our members with disabilities. Accessibility is a concern for us and we’ll strive to ensure that as many people as possible can access and enjoy our growing WordPress tutorial library.
Check out an example of one of our closed captioned videos below.
Click the “CC” icon to enable the captions.
Great news to read! I’ve been a fan of your WordPress video tutorials for years. It’s wonderful to see WP101 taking the steps to add closed captions and ensure the videos are accessible to the WordPress community.
Thank you!
Hi, I create videos with Camtasia and have started to add Closed Captioning. We load our videos to an Amazon S3 account and use the S3Media Maestro plug-in to add it to your membership web page (members need to log in to view the video). However, it doesn’t look like this plug-in allows for Closed Captioning. Where are you hosting your videos and what type of player interface do you use?
Thanks!
Hi, Deborah.
This is just one of the many, many reasons we use and highly recommend Vimeo PRO.
In addition to their gorgeous player interface, they also provide robust support for closed captioning and translations. You can upload your own caption files, or even order captions directly within the settings panel for each video. It couldn’t be easier.
Hope this helps!