CC Icon

If a video has closed captions, there will be a "CC” button located on the video bar to toggle the captions on/off. This icon can look different based on the media player, but as a general rule of thumb, the caption button is usually posted in the lower right-hand corner of the media player.

Depending on the media player, captions may be auto-generated and, in most cases, are inaccurate. Auto-generated captions are captions that were created using speech recognition software. Automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the captions may vary based on sound quality, noise, and complexity of the topic.

TedTalk video with closed-captioning icon highlighted. Icon looks like a speech bubble.

If you find a video and are unsure if it has correct English captions, put them to the test. Turn off the sound and try reading the captions while watching the video. Do the captions make sense? (Hint: punctuation is a must. Otherwise, it's just one, long run-on sentence!)

For longer videos, randomly select 3 sections of the video and read the captions for correctness while watching it.