How to Turn On Closed Captions for YouTube Videos

Closed captions show the words being spoken in a video as text on the screen. They are wonderful when the speaker talks too fast, has an accent that is hard to follow, or when background music makes the voices hard to hear. Captions are also great if you want to watch a video without disturbing someone sleeping in the next room, or if your hearing has changed over time and you want a little extra help following along.

Almost every video on YouTube has closed captions available. Some captions are typed by the person who made the video, and those are the most accurate. Others are created automatically by YouTube using computer voice recognition, which works well most of the time but can make small mistakes with names or unusual words. Either way, captions make videos much easier to follow.

The button you press to turn captions on looks like a small box with the letters CC inside. On a computer, you will see this button along the bottom of the video player. On a phone or tablet, you may need to tap the screen first to make the controls show up. Once you press the CC button, the words will appear at the bottom of the video as people speak.

You can also change how the captions look. The text size, color, and background can all be adjusted so the words are big and clear enough to read comfortably. This is helpful if you find the default text too small. Once you set up captions the way you like, YouTube will remember your choice and use the same settings on every video you watch from that device.