Four Reasons to Transcribe Video Content

Four Reasons to Transcribe Video Content

Daniel Nelson | 22/01/2009

Video content is the pinnacle of rich media on the Internet today. It is highly effective at conveying emotion and personality and is a powerful medium for sharing thoughts and ideas. Videos offer a unique ability to attract and engage users. It’s no wonder that the popularity of video content is spreading so rapidly.

Yes, despite the popularity of video content, it does present several challenges over traditional text based content. Fortunately, these can be easily overcome by providing a transcript of the video. Here are four challenges a transcript can help address:

Some Users May Have Technical Issues
It’s easy to assume that all users now have top of the line computers, updated software and high-speed Internet access. While this may be true for a large percentage of users there are still legitimate visitors who aren’t equipped to adequately view videos. A transcript would ensure this group is not alienated from your content.

Videos are Difficult to Skim for Information
Users like to skim through content to see if it meets their expectations or to locate a necessary snippet of information. This isn’t possible with a video. If you are producing instructional or how to videos the need for text only increases as most users will want an outline of the presentation at a minimum. A transcript would allow users to preview the content, create an outline or follow along during the presentation.

Videos are More Difficult to Optimise for Search Engines
Search engines are not able to index the context of a video. Instead, videos must be manually tagged which is not only time consuming but can often produce poor results. By providing a transcript, search engines can index based on the full context instead of a handful of provided keywords.

Video Content is Not Accessible
By default video content is not accessible to users with disabilities. To comply with W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Gridlines 2.0, all non-text content must have equivalent text content. Videos can comply by including either open or closed captioning. A transcript is necessary to create captioning.

If you do choose to create transcripts from your video presentations you can either create these transcripts yourself or outsource the task to a transcribing service.

tags: Website Accessibility ,  Web 2.0 ,  SEO