As someone who only watches captioned videos, I get frustrated when I find an interesting YouTube video.
Only to learn the video has no closed captions.
In the past, when I wanted to confirm YouTube videos had English captions, I took multiple steps:
- Visit the individual video
- Select the gear icon to open settings
- Check the Subtitles/CC (Closed Caption) option to see if a specific language (I check for English) was referenced. Or whether more than one language was noted in the parentheses. If neither case was true, I knew the video only had autocaptions.
When I was searching YouTube videos last week, I discovered some quicker methods to identify videos with closed captions.
Which excited me!
Anything to eliminate multiple steps is a win to me!
Note: it’s possible the methods were available in the past and I overlooked them.
But knowing the different ways I can confirm captioned videos makes it a lot quicker for me to discover interesting videos to help me with my work.
Two Ways to Discover Whether YouTube Videos are Close Captioned
People find their way to YouTube videos in different ways.
Two common methods are a search on YouTube or a link in a blog post or social media update to a specific YouTube channel.
1. YouTube Search Results
Using the search box on YouTube to search for your particular topic or phrase results in a list of results.
Without using any of the advanced filters, you can identify which videos have closed captions in the results by the CC included underneath the short description of the video.
The image displays the first page of results for a search of “WordPress Block Editor” on YouTube, highlighting one video with closed captioning in the top nine results.
I was glad to notice Anne McCarthy’s video was included in the results. McCarthy consistently publishes helpful how-to and exploration videos about WordPress.
2. YouTube Channel
When you visit a YouTube channel, you can choose Videos in the channel navigation to view all the videos published by that specific producer.
On the Videos page, you’ll find videos with closed captions noted with a CC. Under the video title, after the number of views and how long ago the video was published.
Continuing with videos published by McCarthy, the image displays three rows of five videos with their thumbnail and title.
Summary
For anyone searching only for closed captioned videos on YouTube, the two methods I describe will hopefully speed up your search process.
Speaking for myself, they’ve made a big difference for me, allowing me to more quickly identify videos I’ll watch.
Personally, I hope YouTube goes further to indicate what videos are captioned.
For example, I’d love to have a similar CC display on playlists where all the videos are close captioned. Perhaps that’s in the future?
How about you? Have you discovered any methods to quickly identify close captioned YouTube videos?
