Of the 53 workshops that currently live on Learn WordPress, 29 of them have captions and only 3 have full transcripts. Let’s fix that!
What are we doing?
We are going to hold a dedicated sprint for volunteers to join the Training Team in generating and uploading captions and transcripts for all 53 workshops.
When are we doing it?
The sprint will be held on Friday, 20 August at the following two times:
Each sprint will be 1-2 hours long (although it can go on as long as people are available) and volunteers can join for some or all of it.
Where are we doing it?
The sprint will be coordinated in the #training channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. All you need to do is show up in the channel at the right time.
How are we doing it?
We’ll be using two different services to generate captions and transcripts – Otter.ai for English videos and Sonix.ai for all other languages. This comprehensive guide walks you through the entire process so you don’t need any prior knowledge about how video captions or transcripts work. You will find a sheet with the caption/transcript status of all the published videos here.
Why are we doing it?
Captions and transcripts serve three main purposes for the workshop videos.
- Accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) – captions and transcripts allow anyone to be able to read what is being presented thereby making the videos available to more people.
- Localisation – captions and transcripts, unlike the videos themselves, can be localised. Since all of the workshop videos are hosted on WordPress.tv, once captions have been added any Polyglots contributor can translate and upload them in any other language.
- SEO – the text in the captions and transcripts can be indexed by search engines, making the content significantly more findable across the web.
If you would like to get involved in this work outside of the hours designated for this sprint, then you are welcome (and encouraged!) to do so. Please follow the guide for instructions and let the team know in the #training channel that you’re doing it.
Once this work has concluded and all of the current videos have full captions and transcriptions, this will become a requirement for any new video published on Learn WordPress so we will never host a workshop without them again.
#learn-wordpress
