In response to increasing demand for closed captioning, YouTube is starting to roll out a new captioning service. With improved speech recognition and a revamped user interface, the new tool promises to make captioning video content even easier.

Some YouTube users may encounter a new set of options when entering the Subtitles menu of their YouTube Studio. To begin editing automatically generated captions for a video, users can click “Duplicate and Edit.”

This will bring up the new YouTube caption editor. This tool, unlike previous iterations, allows for users to edit the captions in either paragraph or caption form. This makes editing the captions more natural and efficient. To toggle between the different layouts, users can click either “Edit as Text” or “Assign Timings”.

Once editing is complete, users may click ‘Publish’ to publish their captions to their live video.

A screencast demonstrating the new tool has been produced by the Communications and Community Relations Department. Additional information on the new YouTube captioning tool may be found on the YouTube help page.

Olympia School District staff are also invited to attend the Enhancing the Accuracy of Automatically-Generated Captions workshop in which we will discuss using the new and old tools. In the meantime, if you have any accessibility questions or tips, please reach out to Robert Hardy in the Communications and Community Relations Department.