YouTube’s Closed Captions and How You Can Make Them Better!

You can flag YouTube videos for captioning? Yep, and the law is on your side!

YouTube has more than one billion auto-captioned videos. They’ve been developing tools to engage the community in an effort to make those captions more accurate. Some channels let users contribute titles, descriptions, subtitles, and closed captions to their videos, and now it is possible for users to flag uncaptioned videos and help with quality control.

Users can flag videos that don’t meet CVAA mandates. The law requires video programming that is captioned on TV to also be captioned when distributed on the internet. You can report a video when captions are inaccurate, abusive, or straight-up missing.

Many digital resources are required by law to be captioned. When you find a video on YouTube and the captions are missing or inaccurate, report it. That would be a great service to the community, and potentially to your students too.

Here’s how you do it:

On the bottom right corner of the video screen, there is an ellipsis icon. That is the button you press to report a video.

 

There are a number of reasons to report a video. Captioning is one of them.

A screenshot of the reasons you can choose from when reporting a video. The option called Captions Issue is emphasized.

 

Once you flag a video for a captions issue, you can specify it.

 

A screenshot showing the options you can choose from when reporting a video with a captions issue. The option called Captions are Missing (CVAA) is emphasized.

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