Online Fitness Videos with Closed Captioning for the Hearing Impaired & Parents of Napping Children

It’s hard enough to not have your core muscles working well for you, let alone your ears. Closed captioning isn’t just for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, though, it’s also for parents who want to workout quietly while their children take naps. It’s for those midnight feeding sessions where you need our Neck Routine while nursing or holding a bottle.

We Want to Erase Barriers to Fitness

Our mission is to change lives, one tummy at a time, because we see so many barriers to exercise. We work hard to help our clients overcome the hurdles that keep them from moving their bodies on a regular basis, because exercising isn’t a want — it’s a need.

If you have trouble hearing, we want to meet you where you are. If it’s 11:29 at night {after you have put your child back to bed 17 times, and he’s finally asleep} we want to meet you there. However, not all of our customers can rely on the volume of the video to follow my cues. This is why we have been investing in subtitles for our workouts over the past few years, and we finally have all of them done!

Our journey to closed captioning

It wasn’t easy. When we first launched Fit2B back in 2010 and began receiving requests for CC soon after, the technology to go back and add captions to our workout videos didn’t exist. Then it was out of our price range because we were still growing and making ends meet.

We kept revisiting the idea every time someone would ask, which was really only a few times a year. While adding closed captioning for home fitness videos was getting a little more affordable, many of the premier services used computer technology to “listen” to the video, automatically determine the words being said, and then blindly apply them via a closed caption file. We learned early on that this method resulted in many mistakes and only made the videos more difficult to understand.

For example, when Facebook added subtitles to this popular video we uploaded to our fan page, we got quite a few complaints because FB applies cheap technology minus any proofreading! People thought we had provided the CC service and that we had royally botched it. It was so frustrating!

At Fit2B, we approach each and every workout video and podcast with the goal of delivering amazing content that’s useful, easy to understand, and approachable. For our hearing impaired members, this meant WAITING until the perfect “fit” came along that would allow us to provide high quality closed captioning for each and every workout!

The Nitty-Gritty Details of CC Costs

We have chosen a partner that actually watches every video and manually types the entire transcript. The cost is $1.00 USD per minute, which might not seem like a lot, but do you know how many minutes of workouts we have here on Fit2B Studio?

Um, thousands!!! With over 200 family friendly home exercise videos ranging from 5 minutes to 65 minutes each — plus 12 e-courses with lessons full of educational content — we had to budget and spread the project out over the past year, but we did it!

We’re super proud of this process that assures our Fit2B members receive the most accurate closed caption and transcriptions available. Sure, it cost us a pretty penny, and it means every new workout takes that that much more to produce, but we believe it’s worth it.

You’re worth it.

The person who is unable to listen to my verbal cues for whatever reason (noise sensitivity, loud background, snoozing infant, difficulty hearing) is worth providing this service. And we are so grateful to have the support of loyal members that make improving Fit2B and paying our staff an easy joy!

Now tell us:

Will you be using the closed captioning service? How do subtitles help you in your life?