Table of contents

What is SDH captioning?

SDH stands for “Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing”. SDH captioning or SDH subtitling is a more inclusive form of regular subtitling where aside from displaying the speech, the subtitles also provide information about anything else that you might hear but that a d/Deaf person or person who is hard of hearing would not.

Think of (bees buzzing), (speaks in foreign language), (door closing), and so on, but also think of audio cues that the video does not give with regards to speaker identification. Think of (Otis laughing) or (Maria) “…”

All to provide a more completive experience for those who heavily rely on captions while watching a video.

<aside> 🔊 Write what things sound like Write what something sounds like, not what it looks like. SDH is meant for the hearing impaired, not for the visually impaired! Don’t write: lighting a cigarette Instead write: lighter flicking

</aside>

There’s a few important things to be aware of. One of them is that you continue to use the Happy Scribe guidelines as much as possible, except for the fact that you can write verbatim and that, for the current projects we have, there’s some small formatting additions. See this section for more information.

The additional elements are: atmospherics, speaker identification, music identification. Have a look at each of the 6 sections + the example file!

🔍 Example file

Happy Scribe, transcribing tool

1. 📝 Essential formatting guidelines

2. 🌬️Atmospherics

3. 🗣️ Speaker identification

4. 🙏🏿 How to combine everything?

5. 🏷️ Atmospherics instead of notation tags

6. #️⃣ Songs

That’s it! If you’re able to remember all of the above, you should be our SDH master 🧑‍🏫

Other relevant pages