When you watch a video, you want to understand what they are saying. But, if you have a hard time understand a specific accent, you may miss out on important information. That’s where Chrome’s caption feature comes in. It can help you understand any video, whether it’s because of the accent or if someone hearing impaired is watching it.
The good news is that after you enable the caption feature, they’ll appear on their own. You don’t have to worry about enabling anything every time you want to watch a video. The instructions are beginner-friendly, so you don’t have to ask your techy friend for any help.
How to Enable Google Chrome’s Caption Features – Web
When you want to take a break from work, here’s how you can watch a video with captions. Once you have Chrome open, click on the dots at the top right and go to Settings.
In Settings, scroll down until you see the advanced option and click on it to see more options. On the left side of your screen, under Advanced, click on Accessibility, and the first option on the list will be Live Caption. Toggle this option on. There’s no need for you to find and download anything. Chrome will take care of the rest, and it’ll install the needed speech recognition files.
If you try to watch a video right after enabling the caption, you might not see it right away. Give Chrome some time to download everything. But, if you still don’t see anything, try restarting Chrome and then watching any YouTube video. You should see a black box with the caption.
When you get bored of the caption, click on the X at the top right to remove it. To see more text, click on the arrow pointing down. This will make the box bigger so more text can fit. This is a good option for those times when you missed that last thing they said. Do you find the style a little boring? Here’s how you can spice things up.
How to Customize Chrome’s Captioning
You may read the text, but why not make the text look the way you want. To personalize Chrome’s caption, go to chrome://settings/accessibility. Right below the option to enable captioning, you’ll see the Caption preferences option. Click on the square symbol to go to your computer’s caption preferences.
You have the options of changing the caption color, and you can choose from colors such as:
- White
- Black
- Red
- Green
- Blue
- Yellow
- Magenta
- Cyan
You can change other things such as:
- Caption Color – Default, White, Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Magenta, Cyan.
- Caption Transparency – Default, Opaque, Translucent, Semintranslucent, and Transparent.
- Caption Style – Default, Mono Serif, Proportional Serif, Mono Sand Serif, Proportional Sans Serif, Casual, Cursive, and Small Caps.
- Caption Size – Default, 50%, 100%, 150%, and 200%.
- Caption Effects – Default, None, Raised, Depressed, Uniform, and Drop Shadow.
- Caption Background-color – Default, White, Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan.
- Caption Background Transparency – Default, Opaque, Translucent, Semitransparent, and Transparent.
- Window Color – Default, White, Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan.
- Window Transparency – Default, Opaque, Translucent, Semitranslucent, and Transparent.
At the top, you’ll also see a preview of what your customization will look like. If you’re not happy with what you see, you can always make more changes.
How to Enable and Customize Chrome Captions on Android
When you want to watch some videos on your Android device, you can enable the caption by opening Chrome. Then tap on the dots at the top right and go to Settings. Swipe down a little and tap on Accessibility. The Caption option will be all the way at the bottom.
To turn it on, toggle on the option at the top. To personalize the caption, you can choose from the option at the bottom, such as Language, Text Size, and Caption Style. For Text Size, you can choose from Very small, Small, Normal, Large, and Very large.
For caption style, you can choose from Use app defaults, White on black, Black on white, yellow on black, yellow on blue, and Custom.
The custom options are:
- Font family – Default, Sand-serif, Sans-serif condensed, Sans-serif monospace, Serif, Serif monospace, Casual, Cursive, and Small capitals.
- Text color – Default, White, Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, and more.
- Text opacity – 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.
- Edge type – Default, None, Outline, Drop shadow, Raised, and Depressed.
- Background color – White, Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, and more.
- Background Opacity – 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.
- Caption window color – White, Black, Red, Yello, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, and more.
Conclusion
Thanks to closed captioning, you won’t miss a single word that is said in a video. Adding your own personal touch to the style of the captions is also a plus. If you’re going to have to stare at the text for a while, it might as well be nice to look at. How are you going to customize the captions on your computer or Android device? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and don’t forget to share the article with others on social media.
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