Why caption videos?

Federal law requires that all instructional video is captioned. Therefore, you must caption any videos that you plan on posting in your Canvas courses. As the instructor of the course, you must ensure that instructional videos are accessible. This guarantees that the largest audience possible can benefit from your video. Captions do not only benefit Deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers, but they also benefit users in loud environments, users in quiet libraries, and students learning new languages. Captions will engage more senses in your audience, helping your students retain more knowledge.

Canvas Studio has an official page on how to can add captions to Canvas Studio media. Studio makes adding captions a simple and easy task. The guide below summarizes some of the steps and it is provided to help you get started.

Add Captions
Review and Publish Captions
Upload Captions

Add Captions

To begin adding captions, upload your media to Canvas Studio, then open the media. This can be done by clicking on the thumbnail of your media.

To generate or upload captions, click "Captions."

To automatically generate captions for your media, choose the spoken language [1] and click the "Request" button [2].

Once captions are generated, you receive an email when captions are ready for review. This helps you avoid having to continually refresh the page for updates. Captions function up to 2x the playback speed.

Generate Captions

After your caption file has been queued and processed, your generated caption file will appear in the "Manage Captions."

Review and Publish Captions

Once captions are generated, you receive an email when captions are ready for review. This helps you avoid having to continually refresh the page for updates.

View Captions

To view more options for the caption file, click the "Options" icon [1]. To review and publish the captions, click the "Edit" link [2]. When you are editing the auto-generated caption file, the media file will automatically pause until you click the next timestamp.

You can also download [3], replace [4], or delete [5] any caption file.

View Caption Options

Review the generated caption file and click the "Publish" button. Any additional changes made to the caption file after it is published will be saved automatically.

Review Publish Captions

Upload Captions

This section is especially relevant to videos that you imported from YouTube. Those videos can be imported into Canvas Studio. However, their captions (which may or may not be present on YouTube) do not transfer over to Studio. To amend this issue, one can upload an SRT file containing all the captions and all it to the media in Canvas Studio.

What is an SRT file?

A SubRip file, also known as an SRT file, is a text file that contains critical information regarding subtitles. This information is important because it contains the captioning for your media, along with timestamps, so that your captions match the audio. SRT files can be uploaded to media in Canvas Studio.

To upload a caption file, click the language button for the caption file you want to upload [1].

To upload a custom caption file, click the "Show More" link [2].

Upload Captions

Upload Custom Captions

Click the language name or the "Custom" button.

Upload Custom Captions

Enter the name of the language [1] and click the "Submit" button [2].

Enter Language

Select File

Locate and select the file on your computer [1]. Click the "Choose" or "Open" button [2]. The file can be either and SRT file or a VTT file.

Select File

Before you click "next," have you finished with all the tabbed sections on this page?