People often watch videos without sound, especially on phones, and captions make your message accessible in any situation.
If you've never added captions before, don't worry — tools like YouTube make it easy. When you upload a video to YouTube, it automatically creates captions using speech recognition. These auto-captions are a good start, but they often include errors. To meet accessibility guidelines, captions must be at least 99% accurate.
Here’s how to edit YouTube captions:
- Open your video in YouTube Studio.
- Click Subtitles from the left menu.
- Choose the automatic track and click Edit.
- Fix any mistakes in spelling, grammar, or timing.
- Click Publish.
Captions should match what’s said, appear in sync with the audio, and include speaker names or important sounds (like [laughter] or [music]).
Providing accurate captions ensures everyone can understand your videos — no matter their hearing ability, language background, or environment. It's one of the easiest and most impactful ways to make your content more inclusive and provide Access to All. Because at Durango School District, it's the way we do things!