We now have the ability to display closed captions in our HTML 5 player, as well as show the full transcript of a course in English (optionally translated into over 50 languages) on a new Transcript tab for a course!
You may have recently noticed the addition of a CC icon next to many of our courses. You’ll continue to see these pop up as we fine tune and upload the transcripts for our courses. If a course displays the CC icon (and if you have a current subscription) you will be able to watch the course with closed captions turned on.
You’ll also be able to view the entire transcript of the course by clicking the Transcript tab on any course with the CC icon.
What about non-English speakers?
We provide translations of our English transcripts in a variety of languages, courtesy of the Google Translate service. We store your language preference with your user profile, so you only need to select a language once, and from then on, you’ll always see closed captions and transcripts in that language. You can switch languages at any time, and we will remember your preference.
How do I use a course transcript?
When you select a course that has the CC icon on it, you’ll see a new “Transcript” tab appear. Click that tab and you’ll see all of the modules for the course listed, and each clip in a module will have a big paragraph of text under it that is the transcript for that clip’s video. If you hover your mouse over the text, you’ll notice that the paragraph is broken up into smaller timecoded blocks of text. By clicking on one of those blocks, our player will fire up and start playing that clip for you. If you’re using the HTML 5 player, it’ll even seek to the time code and start playing right where that line of text occurs in the video!
How can I access closed captions in the player?
First of all, make sure you’re using a player that has caption support. As of this writing, only our HTML 5 player supports captions. Next, make sure the course you are watching has the CC icon on it. That tells you that a transcript is available. When you bring up the player, you should see a CC button in the control bar at the bottom of the player. Just click that button to turn on closed captions. Easy!
When will my favorite course have its transcripts ready?
Transcribing a course is a big job, and we are hard at work getting this done for as many courses as we can. Please be patient with us. We are committed to transcribing any new courses that come out, but we may not get to some of our older and less popular courses for quite some time (if at all).
Which players can display closed captions?
We have a number of players, but right now only one supports closed captions: our HTML 5 beta player.
Why can’t I see the transcripts for a course that is marked with the CC icon?
Our normal paid subscribers should be able to see transcripts for any course with a Closed Caption icon. Some of our free subscribers (MSDN starter subscriptions, for example) only have access to a subset of our courses. The rule is this: if you are allowed to watch the video for a course, you are allowed to see its transcript. This applies to free trials as well – once your trial minutes run out, you’ll no longer see transcripts for courses.
I did try it already and it worked unexpectedly well with the Russian automatic translation – with a few annoying errors here and there, of course.
Will there be a chance to “teach” this automatic system how to translate certain specific terms?
(e.g. it translates “framework” with the word for photoframe)
We’re definitely interested in figuring out ways that our community can help us make the translations better. Thanks for the idea!
Just for fun I turned on “cc” + russian translation in “Generics” (C# Fundamentals, Part 1) and it was really bad. In every sentence the word “generic” was translated literally and each time by a different synonym (common, general, universal etc.) – users would be absolutely clueless.
On the other hand – probably there are not so many legal Russian subsribers who do not speak English.
Thanks guys, my primary language is Portuguese and I use English only to read and write, so listen in some cases (authors =) ) is quite hard for me, the captions in English will help a lot.
Muchas Gracias por ese gran aporte. Lo probaré.
Thank you so much for the closed captioning! It is very much appreciated!!
This is a great start for making pluralsight even more accessible worldwide. I have had this request every time I presented teampulse to dev. teams or collegues.
thanks, as a deaf person this is a big help
Thanks for making videos more accessible, so that more people will be able to see them.
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hi,thanks a lot,did you prepare CC for previous courses such ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Fundamentals or MVC 4 Fundamentals?
While we don’t yet know all the courses that will end up getting captions, I can tell you that we will have much better coverage of the older courses than we do today. We’re nowhere near done yet!
thanks for your quick answers,
how can i have closed caption in my computer?
Transcripts are a great idea – and necessary for those who have a hearing difficulty. Unfortunately many of the current transcripts (all those on the 5 courses I’ve followed so far) are very unprofessional; in many cases the speakers meaning is completely garbled (e.g. speaker says “abstract away” transcript says “obstruct a way”!). There are so many errors such as this that I can only assume that this important accessibility feature was not implemented by a fluent English speaker (or even a person). For the benefit of those with hearing problems there should be at least a mechanism to allow users to suggest corrections.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the feedback. Our transcripts are done by people (not automated), but we do have some issues with transcribing technical language. We are looking to remedy this situation this year by bringing our transcription process in-house so we have more consistency and control, so look for them to improve going forward.
Fritz Onion
Editor in Chief
Thanks! You guys did/are doing a great job! Love it! Please keep going and add the CCs on the videos which are for beginning learners ASAP., such like SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, SharePoint foundmental, T-SQL, ASP.Net, XML ……
You transcripts make your courses shinnig and more worthful. Acctually, I’ve just unsubscribed an other online learning website and switch to PluralSight when I found your courses come with CCs.
Thanks agian!
Adrienne
Thanks
Maybe some of the subscribers could help out with transcripts – in exchange for a free prolongation of the subcription.
Agreed. Crowdsourcing has many benefits not found in-house.
In fact, why not combine the best of both worlds to provide amendments to existing transcripts?
About a month ago, I found a spelling mistake, and reported it to plualsight. That’s crowdsourcing, and you didn’t have to pay me – but the idea of a ‘free prolongation of the subscription’ sounds tempting enough to make me find any more spelling errors resulting in better quality transcripts.