Who this is for
Faculty who record lectures, host class sessions on Zoom, post YouTube videos, or share recorded presentations with students in Canvas.
Every tool listed here includes captioning at no extra cost. In most cases it is a setting you turn on once and then forget about. The part that takes real effort is reviewing what the machine produces, and this article covers that too.
Why captions matter
Captions are what make your video content usable for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. They also help students watching in a noisy space, students working in a second language, and anyone trying to search a lecture for the one thing they need before an exam.
There is a compliance side as well. Because the university accepts federal funding, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to our digital course content, with a compliance deadline of May 11, 2027. Captioning your course video is one of the most visible pieces of that work.
Start here: automatic captions are a first draft
Every tool in this article uses speech recognition to generate captions automatically. That technology is good, not perfect. It typically lands somewhere in the mid 80s to mid 90s for accuracy on clean audio, and it drops when there is background noise, crosstalk, or a strong accent in the room.
Where it reliably struggles:
- Proper names, including your students' names
- Discipline specific vocabulary
- Punctuation and capitalization
- Homophones (their, there, they're)
So the workflow for any recorded video is the same no matter which tool you use. Generate the automatic captions, read through them, fix the errors, then publish. A ten minute video usually takes about ten to fifteen minutes to clean up once you get the hang of it.
A few habits that cut your editing time in half:
- Use a headset or external microphone instead of your laptop's built in mic.
- Record in a quiet room with the door closed.
- Say technical terms and names clearly the first time you use them.
- Repeat student questions before you answer them, so the answer makes sense in the transcript.
Zoom
Live captions during a class session
Automatic captions have to be enabled on your Zoom account before the Show Captions button appears in your meeting toolbar. This is a one time setup.
- Sign in to the Zoom web portal in a browser, not the desktop app.
- In the left menu under Personal, click Settings, then open the Meeting tab.
- Scroll to the In Meeting (Advanced) section.
- Turn on Automated captions.
- Turn on Full transcript so students can open a scrolling transcript panel next to the video instead of reading a single line at the bottom.
- Consider Save captions, which lets attendees save the transcript when the session ends. Leave this one off if your class discussions involve anything confidential.
Then, in the meeting itself:
- Click Show Captions in your Zoom toolbar.
- Choose the spoken language when prompted and save.
- Everyone in the meeting gets a notice that captions are on. Students then choose for themselves whether to display them.
Two things worth knowing. Students can set their own Zoom preference so captions turn on automatically in any session where the host has enabled them, which saves everyone a step. And captions do not carry into breakout rooms automatically, so if you use breakouts regularly, tell students they may need to turn captions back on when they move between rooms.
Captions on a Zoom recording you post to Canvas
If you record to the cloud, Zoom can produce a transcript file that plays as captions on the recording.
- Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
- Go to Settings, then the Recording tab.
- Confirm Cloud recording is on.
- Under Advanced cloud recording settings, check Create audio transcript and save.
Important: this only applies going forward. Zoom cannot generate a transcript for a recording you made before the setting was turned on, so turn it on now rather than the week you need it.
After the session, Zoom processes the recording first and the transcript second. You will get an email when the transcript is ready. It arrives as a VTT file, which you can review and edit right in the Zoom web portal by opening the recording, hovering over a line in the transcript panel, and clicking the pencil icon. You can also download the VTT and edit it in any text editor, or upload it to another platform as a caption file.
YouTube
YouTube runs speech recognition on every video you upload and publishes an automatic caption track, usually within a few hours depending on the length of the video.
Reviewing and fixing the automatic track
- Go to studio.youtube.com and sign in.
- Select Subtitles from the left menu, then choose your video.
- Find the track labeled with your language followed by (Automatic).
- Click Duplicate and Edit. This gives you an editable copy so the original stays intact.
- Correct wording, punctuation, capitalization, and names. Add bracketed notes for meaningful sounds, like [laughter] or [door slams], when they matter to the content.
- Check the timing. Aim for each caption block to stay on screen roughly three to seven seconds so students have time to read it.
- Click Publish in the upper right. Captions are not live until you do this.
If you do not see an Automatic track yet, YouTube is still processing. Check back later.
Uploading a caption file instead
If you already have a caption file, from a Zoom transcript or a captioning vendor, you can skip the editing interface.
- In YouTube Studio, open Subtitles for the video.
- Click Add Language and choose the language.
- Under Subtitles, click ADD, then choose Upload file.
- Choose With timing for an SRT or VTT file that already has timestamps, or Without timing if you are uploading a plain text transcript and want YouTube to sync it for you.
- Review and publish.
Setting the video language
Set your video language correctly in the video details before you rely on automatic captions. If YouTube thinks your English lecture is in another language, the automatic track will be unusable.
One note on embedding
Captions travel with the YouTube video when you embed it in a Canvas page, so students see the CC button in the embedded player. If you instead download a YouTube video and upload the file somewhere else, the captions do not come with it. You would need to add them again on the new platform.
Live presentations
These options caption you as you speak. They are helpful in the moment but the captions are not saved anywhere, so they do not replace captioning your recorded material.
PowerPoint
Available in Microsoft 365 and PowerPoint for the web.
- Open the Slide Show tab in the ribbon.
- In the Captions and Subtitles group, check Always Use Subtitles.
- Open Subtitle Settings to set your spoken language, the language the captions display in, and where they appear on screen.
- Start your slide show as usual. You can also toggle subtitles on and off from the toolbar during the presentation.
Setting the caption language to something other than your spoken language gives you live translated subtitles, which some faculty use for multilingual sections.
Google Slides
Captions in Slides come from your own microphone and are supported in the Chrome browser in U.S. English.
- Open your presentation and click Present.
- Click the CC button in the toolbar at the bottom of the presenting screen, or press Ctrl + Shift + C on Windows or Command + Shift + C on Mac.
- Speak normally. Captions appear at the bottom of the screen.
Captions in Slides do not include punctuation and are not stored after you finish. If you are presenting over a video conference, tell your audience the captions are coming from Slides rather than from the conferencing tool, and remember that only the presenter's voice gets captioned.
What good captions look like
When you review a caption track, you are checking for these things:
- Words match what was actually said, including names and technical terms
- Sentences have punctuation and capitalization
- Speaker changes are identified when more than one person is talking
- Meaningful non speech sounds are noted in brackets
- Captions appear and disappear in sync with the audio
- Each caption block stays on screen long enough to read comfortably
Where automatic captions are not enough
Automatic captions are a baseline for everyone. They are not a substitute for an approved accommodation. If a student in your course has an accommodation for captioning or interpreting services, that goes through Student Accessibility and Accommodation, and professional captioning or CART services get arranged through that process. If you are unsure whether what you have is sufficient for a specific student, ask rather than guess.
Getting help
If you get stuck on any of these steps, or you have a large back catalog of video and want help thinking through where to start, contact Educational Technology. We can walk through your course with you and help you prioritize which videos need attention first.