How to add captions to lecture videos (and why your LMS wants them)

Captions used to be a nice-to-have. Today they're an accessibility requirement on most university LMS platforms — and one of the highest-impact upgrades you can make to a lecture video. The good news: if your video was transcribed anyway, captions are free.

Why do lecture videos need captions?

• Accessibility policy — many universities require captions on published teaching video (WCAG guidelines, disability legislation, and internal LMS policies all point the same way).
• Non-native speakers follow a lecture far better when they can read along, especially with technical vocabulary.
• Silent viewing — students genuinely do watch lectures on buses and in libraries. No captions, no lecture.
• Search and review — a transcript makes the lecture skimmable when revising for exams.

What's the difference between SRT/VTT files and burned-in captions?

There are two ways to caption a video. Sidecar files (SRT or VTT) travel next to the video: the player shows them as togglable subtitles, and LMS platforms like Canvas and Moodle accept them directly. Burned-in captions are printed onto the picture itself — they can never be turned off, but they survive any player, any platform, and any download.

The right answer for most lecturers is both: upload the video with its VTT file to your LMS (accessible, togglable), and keep a burned-in version for places that don't support subtitle files — WhatsApp groups, social clips, or older portals.

Where should captions sit on a presenter-plus-slides video?

A detail most tools get wrong: in a presenter-plus-slides video, bottom-centre captions can land right on top of the presenter's picture-in-picture box. Captions should be sized like broadcast subtitles and positioned per layout — below the content when there's a free band, or beside a lower-third strip when there isn't — so they never cover the person or the slide content.

How do you add captions to a lecture video automatically?

SkipEdit transcribes every lecture word-by-word as part of its slide-sync analysis, so captions come at no extra cost: every finished video has SRT and VTT files ready to download, and a one-click “Burn captions onto the video” toggle. Burned captions are automatically placed for the layout you chose — the layout picker even shows a small marker of where they'll sit.

If a video was worth recording, it's worth captioning — and if the AI already transcribed it, there's no reason not to.

Frequently asked questions