https://amara.org/embedder-iframe
Having discovered how to more easily caption videos I upload into YouTube, I have now had to deal with video clips that others have uploaded to YouTube. This seems to mean putting an overlay with captions on top of the video, then embedding the overlay on my lecture pages.
In the old days, I used Overstream, which is still there. It was pretty awkward, and now I’ve forgotten how to use it. Our accessibility specialist Robert Erichsen recommended Amara.
My first video captioning experience on Amara was a nightmare. I was working on a cartoon, which I now have memorized, about Nikola Tesla:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/O2ZxvEoOvbY?rel=0&showinfo=0
If you click the CC, you’ll see the awful automatic captioning, which is unusable. (Does YouTube have something against punctuation?)
So I put it in Amara, but the timeline kept shifting when I made a mistake. I had to keep dragging handles right and left, and different segments got mixed up. It took me hours just to straighten it out. Then I got the embed code and put it in my lecture so it looked like this:
I noticed a couple of things:
You can still see the YouTube CC symbol so it’s totally possible to accidentally play the hideous YouTube auto captioning instead.
The embed code was super simple, so simple you can only customize it in “advanced embedding options” with four bits of code, mostly to turn the captions on or off without the viewer clicking.
You cannot change its size. In YouTube itself, to embed any clip, you can easily change its size using the suggested sizes or the dropdowns:
Not in Amara – I have to go into the code and reduce the size proportionally. I do remember how to do this algebraicly, but I graduated high school so that I’d never have to use algebra again, so I use a ratio calculator.
And, I can’t center it. Even though it’s in “div” tags, it won’t center the div. Or accept “span”. I have to create a table by hand and center the table.
And (last one, I promise) you cannot see it in WYSIWYG. Not in Dreamweaver, anyway. At all. I can’t find it. Of course, having to use a table helps – I can set the width and height of the table. At least then I see a blank rectangle.
I appreciate that it’s a free program, but this still seems awfully cumbersome.
