All Stubborn Old Gardeners videos have English subtitles. In addition, we actively encourage and fully cooperate with those willing to caption our videos in other languages. We do this for several reasons:
- It’s the right thing to do. Captioning makes our videos available and useful to those with hearing issues and those for whom English is a second language. And because plants don’t have a habit of talking back to gardeners out loud, hearing impaired people and people who don’t speak English well make great gardeners!
- We’re selfish. Some of us stubborn old gardeners have a hard time hearing; captioning helps us enjoy our own videos!
- The automatic captioning provided by YouTube isn’t reliable. When we add captions we have checked and verified, we ensure that we are communicating accurately. Our audience appreciates that.
- It makes our videos easier to find. Google and YouTube read and index captions so people can search on them. YouTube adds about 60 hours of video content every minute, so we do everything we can to help people find us.
- It engages our viewers. Studies show that viewers keep watching a captioned video longer than one without captions and that they remember the video’s content better.
- It’s easy to do. Just ask one of the video old-timers in CAMGA, and they’ll regale you with the full description of how difficult it was in the bad old days to add captions to our videos. Not any more. We just let YouTube generate a raw captions file, which is usually quite accurate. Then we just tighten it up to make sure punctuation, spelling, and word usage are correct. Feels like cheating, but it works.
