YouTube began offering caption support in 2006. In 2012 over 135 million videos have enabled automatic captions. This is over triple the number from July of last year, when YouTube began offering speech recognition captions in Japanese.

Automatic captions with speech recognition are now offered in Japanese, English and Korean, making it much easier for users to provide these services. Regular caption support is available in 155 languages and dialects, and YouTube is continually updating their features to make captions more accessible to viewers:

To search for videos with captions add “, cc” to any search, or after searching, click Filter > CC to only see results with closed captions.

You can change the look of the captions by clicking on the “CC” icon and then the “Settings…” menu item. This includes changing the font size or colors used.

If the channel owner provides a video caption file in a broadcast format, you can now change its position and style information, just like you’d see on TV. This means the text can appear near the character who is speaking, italicized to indicate an off-camera narrator, or even scrolling if the original captions were generated in a real-time mode.

Features for creators have also been improved to increase availability of captions on the site:

Video creators will notice an increased range of supported caption formats typically used by broadcasters, and if you have captions you created for TV or DVD, YouTube claims they will handle the conversion for you.