How (and why) To: Add Closed Captioning to a YouTube Video

Background

Adding closed captioning (or subtitles) to educational videos and screencasts is an important step to ensuring that our material is accessible and student friendly. Captioning makes our videos accessible to a wider audience, including deaf and hearing impaired users -- although you might be interested to know that most users who make use of captioning are not actually deaf or hard of hearing. Some other common reasons that students utilize subtitles include:

• watching video in noisy or quiet places
• English as a second language
• subtitles help some viewers stay focused

Captioning also helps to increase the search ranking of a video so that it is more easily discovered through search engines.

The purpose of this document is to share simple steps for adding captioning. By leveraging YouTube’s speech recognition technology, captioning videos is simpler and quicker than you might think.

Procedure

Assuming the audio quality of your video is decent the easiest way to add captioning is to leverage YouTube’s auto-captions and make any corrections (If not, you may want to upload a script and start from there). It’s important to note that even if the auto-captioning is perfect, you’ll still want to follow these steps to add some basic punctuation and adjust the spacing so that sentences are not truncated wherever possible, as this greatly enhances readability.

If you click on the closed captions option (CC) of a video that has not been reviewed by a human, you’ll see the "auto-generated" alert display briefly at the top left.

Note for planning purposes that, depending on video complexity and other YouTube visitor activity, it may take multiple hours for auto-generated captions to become available for freshly uploaded videos.

Following are the steps for leveraging and improving YouTube’s auto-generated captions:

1. Login to YouTube
2. Click on your account image from the top right, and choose YouTube Studio
3. Choose Subtitles from the left menu
4. Click the video you want to add captions or subtitles to.
5. From the "Subtitles" column, click Options (three vertical dots) next to the subtitles for the "English (Automatic)" version, choose "Edit on Classic Studio".
6. Click Edit button.
7. Review automatic captioning and edit or remove any parts that haven't been properly transcribed. Tip: When re-positioning captions, selecting the caption you are lengthening (not shortening) will avoid creating gaps in the captions.
8. Click "Save Changes" button when complete.
9. You’ll note that a second set of captions now appears, and this will be used when viewer chooses English captions.

Closing

Please consider adding closed captioning (or subtitles) to all of our educational videos and screencasts. Captioning is an important tenet of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and speech recognition technology has come a long way over the years, so teachers and content creators do not need to lean on their tech team to make videos accessible. Closed captioning is an important superpower that all educators have on their tool belts.

*Header photo: Working tools on a special belt for children's games by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0