YouTube & DIY Captions

Students: I made this video for my class, do I need to caption it?

Yes!  Captioning your video gives your classmates another way to access the audio for it. How?

Do It Yourself (DIY) Captions

There are several Do It Yourself (DIY) captioning tools that you can use for live captioning your lecture, video calls, or pre-recorded videos.

Important: Built-in microphones or standalone microphones and headsets can complicate things with automated captioning your lecture or video calls. For automatic captioning tools, use a laptop built-in camera and microphone or standalone microphone. This way the apps could “hear” voices in video calls to provide automatic captions. For instance, headsets with an attached microphone will not work to "hear" voices in video calls in order to provide captions. Automated captioning does have limited speaker identification, limited punctuation, and accuracy is highly dependent on audio quality. 

Please note: Auto-captions are often machine-generated captions with poor quality in which content is not accurately communicated to people who depend on captions. Auto-captions should be corrected for accuracy and provide equal access for everyone.

Creators/owners should review auto-generated captions for accuracy. Accuracy highly dependent on audio quality.

  • Vocabulary 
  • Terminology
  • Acronyms
  • Names
  • Locations
  • Unusual words
  • Complex Technical Language
  • Limited punctuation
  • Limited speaker identification
  • Incorrect words choice do not match the spoken audio (e.g. Can vs Can’t, Know vs No, Hear vs Here, Ban vs Van, Cake vs Kate, Savvy vs Say Vi)
  • Add sound effects and music if applicable (e.g. (water dripping), (upbeat music), (audience cheering), (balloon pops), etc. Descriptive captions help to ensure the viewers have full experience of the sound and enjoy the media.

YouTube Captions Guide

Subtitles and captions allow you to share your videos with a larger audience, including deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers and viewers who speak another language. Learn more about editing or removing existing captions.

  1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
  2. From the left menu, select Subtitles.
  3. Select the video that you'd like to edit.
  4. Click ADD LANGUAGE and select your language.
  5. Under "Subtitles", click ADD.
  6. Then choose from one of the options to add your subtitles and captions.  

Please note: Auto-captions are often machine-generated captions with poor quality in which content is not accurately communicated to people who depend on captions. Auto-captions should be corrected for accuracy and provide equal access for everyone.

For more ways to add captions on YouTube visit: Google: Add Your Own Subtitles and Captions

Amara offers a free caption/translation editor, and they’re building a community to support it.

Captions are available on videos when the owner has added them or when YouTube automatically provides them. You can change the default settings for captions on your computer or mobile device. Burned-in captions/subtitles do not have these options. Visit Manage Caption Settings.

  • Go to YouTube video player
  • Select Settings gear icon
  • Select Subtitles/CC
Captions Settings options.

Select Options to customize

Captions options.
    Captions font, color, size, and background options.
    • Font, color, opacity, and size
    • Background color and opacity
    • Window color and opacity
    • Character edge style

    Note: These will be your default captions format settings until you change them again or select Reset, which will go back to the default captions format.

    • Go to YouTube video player
    • Select anywhere in the description box below the video
    • Select the Show Transcript button
    • In the transcript box, use Find or CTRL + F in your browser to search for a specific word in the transcript
    • Or use the timestamps to get to that point in the video
    YouTube transcript description box.

     

    YouTube Show Transcript button.

     

    YouTube transcript panel.

     

    • Go to YouTube video player
    • Find a video you'd like to share at a specific start time
    • Select Share button
    • Find the small checkbox which says "Start at:"