path: root/2023/volunteer/caption.md

[[!meta title="Caption volunteer"]]

# Responsibilities

- Write captions or edit auto-generated captions in order to make
  pre-recorded videos easier to understand
- (optional) Note chapter markers
- (optional) Note other things that may need additional help to make
  them accessible, such as images not described in the speaker's
  voiceover
- (optional) Help extract information from Q&A videos after the conference

# Preparation

We'll set up a protected directory so you can get a sneak peek at the
prerecorded videos, and we'll e-mail you the username and password to
use. If slides, scripts, or auto-generated captions are available as a
starting point, we'll upload those as well.

# Process

We'll e-mail all the captioning volunteers once speakers submit videos. 

When you want to caption a video, browse through the protected
directory to see which ones are available for captioning. E-mail
<sacha@sachachua.com> or send a message to `sachac` via IRC
(`#emacsconf-org` on IRC) so that we can reserve that one for you.
Check out these [[captioning]] tips and fire up your favorite subtitle
editor.

We find that captioning generally takes between 2-6x the video time if
you're an experienced captioner editing auto-generated captions, and
can take a bit longer than that if you're starting out or starting
from scratch. You can work with timestamps, or you can send us plain
text and we'll get them aligned with the videos. It's okay to work in
small chunks.

E-mail your partial or finished captions to <sacha@sachachua.com> .
When you're finished, we'll send them to the speaker for review and
prepare the transcript for inclusion in the wiki.

When the streamer shows the pre-recorded video, your captions will be
included below it. They will also be combined into a transcript for
the wiki, which will be published when the talk is live. Chapter
markers will be listed below videos so that people can jump to
specific sections.

# After the conference

If any talks weren't captioned by the time of the conference, you're certainly welcome to help caption them afterwards. We'll also extract the Q&A sessions and work on either chapter markers (to indicate when specific questions were answered) or captions for those.

Here's what people said about how most of the EmacsConf 2021 talks were streamed with captions during the conference itself:

- "I really appreciate the approach of doing things prerecorded and having captions."
- "The captions for this conference have has an impressive amount of work put into them."
- "++ to all that stuff. Great job on the captions, and the demonstrated functionality is very impressive."
- "At first, I thought the captions would be unnecessary, but over time, understanding the accents for various individuals has been challenging, so the captions helped."

Your captions will not only make talks more accessible during the conference, but also more searchable and more browsable after the conference. Thank you!

[[Check out other ways to volunteer|2023/volunteer]]

[[!taglink CategoryVolunteer ]]