Captions that Clarify – Creating Accessible, Accurate Subtitles Rapidly

Do you trust YouTube’s AI or create your own?

Clear captions aren’t just a legal requirement for many platforms — they’re part of good teaching practice. Whether you’re producing science videos, sailing tutorials for pmrsailing.uk, organ recordings, or lessons for Hemel Private Tuition, captions help more viewers access your content.

But the big question remains:
Should you rely on YouTube’s AI subtitles, or should you create your own?

At Philip M Russell Ltd, we do both — strategically.

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Why Captions Matter

Captions support:

• Students learning in noisy homes

• Viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing

• Learners who process text better than audio

• Non-native English speakers

• People watching on mobile without sound

• Anyone revising key points in a lesson

They improve accessibility and boost SEO by giving platforms more text to index.

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Option 1: YouTube Auto-Captions

YouTube’s AI has improved dramatically.
It’s fast — captions appear within minutes — and it handles:

• clear speech

• clean audio

• consistent pacing

• neutral accents

For simple videos, especially narration-heavy science clips, YouTube’s auto-captions can be surprisingly accurate.

Pros

✔ Instant
✔ Free
✔ Good accuracy with clean audio
✔ Easy to edit inside YouTube Studio

Cons

✖ Struggles with technical vocabulary (molarity, spectroscopy, “tell-tales”)
✖ Mishears sailing terms (“gybe” becomes “jive”)
✖ Won’t format properly
✖ No punctuation finesse
✖ Errors remain if you don’t manually check

For anything involving science terminology or sailing instructions, you must edit the auto track.

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Option 2: Create Your Own Captions

This takes slightly longer but gives complete control.

You can create captions using:

• DaVinci Resolve’s transcript & subtitle tool

• YouTube Studio manual editor

• Subtitle apps (Aegisub, Kapwing, Descript)

• Speech-to-text software with correction

• .srt files exported directly from your edit

Creating captions manually ensures:

• Correct scientific spelling

• Proper sailing vocabulary

• Accurate timings

• Clean punctuation

• Line breaks that match meaning

• Multi-speaker differentiation

• Notes on sound effects where needed

• Accessibility compliance

For educational content, this is often worth the extra effort.

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The Workflow We Use

At Philip M Russell Ltd, we use a hybrid approach:

1. Start with YouTube’s AI

It produces a good draft and saves a lot of typing.

2. Edit every line manually

Fix:

• scientific terms (e.g., “endothermic”, “eutrophication”)

• sailing jargon (e.g., “leeward”, “spinnaker”, “tell-tale”)

• punctuation

• timing offsets

• speaker identification

3. Export subtitles where needed

For videos hosted outside YouTube — on websites, Moodle, or for downloads — we upload an SRT file for accuracy.

4. Use Resolve for more complex projects

Especially multi-camera lessons, organ performances, and science demonstrations where timing matters.

This approach gives speed and accuracy.

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The Takeaway

Accessible captions aren’t optional — they’re part of good teaching and good video practice.
YouTube’s automatic captions give you speed, but manual correction gives you quality.

The best system is a hybrid:
AI for draft → human for accuracy → polished captions for your audience, and most importantly, they can be translated into any language.