Closed Captioning PART I: Log in To get started, log in to your YouTube account. If you don’t already have an account you can sign up for one by clicking ‘Create account’.

Once you’ve signed in, select your account icon in the top right corner of the homepage and select ‘YouTube Studio (beta)’ from the dropdown menu. This will take you to your dashboard.

PART II: Select a video

From here, select the ‘Videos’ tab in the taskbar on the left to browse your recent uploads. If you haven’t uploaded any videos yet you can do so by clicking the camera icon up here. Otherwise, you can select a video you would like to caption.

Now that you’ve selected a video, we’re almost ready to start captioning but first we have to click on the ‘Advanced’ tab on the top of the page.

You may notice that YouTube will auto generate subtitles for most of your videos. This is a good starting point but sometimes the texts need some adjustments.

To do this, click on the bubble and select ‘Edit on Classic Studio’. This will open a new tab with a video player. You can preview the subtitles here by hitting play.

To edit the text on the timeline select the ‘Edit’ button in the top right.

PART III: Closed captions

Now you can select the body of text you would like to change on the left side, making sure to correct any typos in capitalization, punctuation and spelling.

You can adjust the length of each block of text using the timeline below the video player. To change the length, hover over the text until blue bars appear on the left and right sides. Click and drag these bars, forward and backward, until the timing matches the video.

If your video has music in it, you may want to inform your viewers when there is no dialogue present. To do this, click on the plus button to generate a new text box where the gap in audio occurs and input a description of the sound in brackets.

Once you’re all done with your captions, click on the ‘Save changes’ button in the top right. This will save any changes you have made and publish the new closed captions to your video.

If you would like to download the text as an .sbv file, you can return to the ‘Advanced’ tab of the YouTube studio page and select the new closed captions you just published. Then click ‘Download’ from the drop-down menu and you’re all done.