How to Enable YouTube Captions by Default

Captions are only available on YouTube videos where the owner has added them and on certain videos where YouTube provides them automatically with speech recognition technology (automatic captions are available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). This article shows you how to enable YouTube captions. 

Enable YouTube captions by default

Step 1: Click on your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the page.

Step 2: Select Settings from the drop-down menu.

Step 3: Click Playback and performance on the left-hand menu.

Step 4: Check Always show captions to enable owner-added captions for every video available. 

Step 5: Check Show automatic captions by speech recognition (when available) to show automatically-generated captions by YouTube.

Step 6: Click Save to save your changes.

Now you won't have to manually turn on captions on YouTube videos where they are available.

Turn captions on or off

If a YouTube video has captions, you can turn them on or off.

Step 1: Open a YouTube video.

Step 2: Click the Caption button ( or depending on your location and device) in the bottom-right of the video player. 

To turn caption off, just click the Caption button again.

You can also click the Gear icon in the bottom-right corner of the video, select Subtitles/CC, and choose your desired subtitle language.

You can also select a different caption language by clicking Auto-translate and select your desired language. The original caption will be translated to that language automatically using Google Translate.

Change the default size and style of captions

Step 1: Open a YouTube video.
Step 2: Click the Gear icon in the bottom-right of the video player.

Step 3: Select Subtitles/CC.

Step 4: Click Options.

Step 5: You can customize:

1. Font, color, opacity, and size.
2. Background color and opacity.
3. Window color and opacity.
4. Character edge style.