As an organization committed to pushing disability culture forward, DisArt is always seeking ways to efficiently and professionally make our content accessible to the largest number of people.
We recently came across Kapwing; an easy to use software platform that has made creating open captioning for videos a breeze. Start with the auto generate option and then make your own adjustments to ensure accuracy of words and timing.
Kapwing has a free version that has many of the same features as the pro version so it is a great option for those who want to check it out or are working on small projects. We recently switched to the Pro Version so that we could caption longer videos that we have recently begun sharing on Instagram and Facebook.
Check out the Kapwing 101: Using Kapwing for Social Media Marketing on the Udemy educational platform to learn about all the other features that Kapwing has to offer. Our social media team is now able to easily resize videos, edit and caption videos, and create memes.
Kapwing has plenty of resources available to assist you with your captioning project including an article on How to Add Subtitles to an Instagram Video.
Below is a tutorial on how to add subtitles:
- Use the auto-generate subtitle option to get started. Select the video language before clicking “Auto Generate”.
2. Double check the accuracy of the subtitles. Keep in mind that not all speech patterns are accurately detected by the automatically subtitling software.
In this example, “Han byul” should be “Hanbyul” and “discharge” should be “DisArt”. Also make sure to double-check punctuation.
Click directly the text to make your edits.
3. Adjust the times so that the subtitles fit in the desired number of lines.
In this example, we determined that we did not want more than two lines of text. Therefore, we needed to adjust the times in the example below. To do this, play the video and pause at the last word you would like included in the subtitle. Once paused, click “set to current time”.
4. Continue to adjust all the times, as needed, to match the video. Once we clicked “set to current time”, you will also want to click “set to current time” in the first timestamp in the subtitle below the one you just adjusted.
5. Continue until all text, punctuation, spacing, and timing is accurate. You may want to use the “Duplicate” or “Remove” buttons during this process.
You can also make minor time adjustments by clicking the up and down arrows in the individual timestamps.
6. Quick tip: The best way to darken the captioning text box is to duplicate the subtitle.
7. You can adjust the captions. Font type, size, placement, and background.
Our preferences are the following:
- Arial
- 14pt or larger
- Centered justification
- Wrap background
8. Once finished click “Done”.