Hello everyone!

I can’t believe we’re already up to week 5 – that means that I’ve successfully continued a thing for over a month! (small successes – woo!). This week, I wanted to have a chat (is it a chat if it’s written down?) about my YouTube videos.

For those of you who know, I’ve been making YouTube videos for almost six years now – although my channel now doesn’t reflect this and all the public videos are much newer, I consider myself pretty well versed on how YouTube works. Lately, alongside posting blogs everyday, I’ve been working on making a more consistent upload schedule for my videos as well (Thursdays and Sundays at 6pm California time – if you’re interested). I’ve been doing an online course that YouTube run through their Creator Academy to learn about how to build a successful platform. I’ve actually found it really interesting what kinds of tactics people can use to gain an interactive audience.

One thing that I learnt was how the use of subtitles/closed captioning can be helpful. By adding these to videos, it means that you’re opening up your videos to be available to more people who are hard of hearing or can engage better through written word. I personally love subtitles and will often have them on when we’re watching Netflix and so it seemed like an obvious option to include these on my videos. For some reason, the automatic detector thing really struggles with my voice/how quickly I talk – which means that I need to manually type my subtitles. While I’m a pretty fast typer and it’s a fairly easy task – it takes a LONG time. I recently closed captioned my video about going to the MTV Movie Awards, and it was over two thousand words long by the time I was finished.

Although it’s quite a bit of work adding these to my videos, I’m going to make an effort to start including the subtitles on most of my videos that I upload from now on. After I finished doing these on a couple of my recent videos I felt really good about myself that I went to the effort of making the videos more accessible to a wider audience – which is something that most people can’t be bothered with.

You can tell which videos I’ve added the subtitles to as they have the CC symbol below the title and also at the bottom of the video.

Thanks for reading!

Sara