13 April 2021 08:41 IST
Captions are now working on our latest Small is Beautiful video! My fault… detailing below in case anyone else comes across the same issue…
Why my Vimeo captions weren’t working:
I’d generated the captions from the edited automated transcript (using Simon Says) as usual, and exported them in .srt format. When I tried to upload them to the Vimeo distribution section, the usual upload interface didn’t appear after choosing the file, but refreshing the page would show that the captions were uploaded sucessfully. Enabling the captions worked in so far as the CC button was visible and toggle-able on the video player, however the captions themselves did not show up.
Comparing the captions file to previous episode’s files showed no obvious differences. Then I tried different formats too, same issue as above.
Finally, looking through the Vimeo Support page, I noticed advice to run the WebVTT-formatted captions through a validator. Wondering if there might be some problematic characters in the caption text, I used the first WebVTT validator I found to validate the .vtt version of the captions file and got the following errors:
Line 3000, column 13: Incorrect start tag.
Line 3007, column 18: Incorrect start tag.
Turned out the issues were me using <div> and id="" in the caption text, trying to be a bit too clever in making the text more understandable. Both bits of markup were getting confused with the caption meta information. I tweaked the text, reuploaded and now our captions are working correctly. Hoorah!