Like Microsoft Stream, YouTube captioning enhances video accessibility. It allows content creators to add text overlays, and display dialogue or auditory cues, making videos accessible to a wider audience, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing. YouTube offers an automatic captioning feature, utilizing speech recognition technology to generate captions for videos. These auto-generated captions need refinement for accuracy.

To manually add or edit captions, navigate to your video within the YouTube Studio, select “Subtitles” in the left menu, choose the language, and you can then add captions directly in the video timeline. For accuracy, review and adjust the auto-generated captions or upload a custom caption file in formats like SRT or VTT. This approach—leveraging YouTube’s automatic feature and making manual adjustments—ensures your videos are accessible.

How (and why) to add captions to your YouTube videos

YouTube has a blog dedicated to adding captions to YouTube videos. Access the link below to follow their step-by-step guide to add captions to your videos: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/caption-my-youtube-videos/

Activity

Orient yourself to the subtitle settings in YouTube Studio with this H5P activity.