Accessibility update: closed captions

You can now add closed captions to your base videos. The captions are off by default, but the viewer can enable them by clicking or tapping the 'Closed captions' button. Check out the example below!

How to add captions

1. Start editing your ThingLink video
2. Select Settings
3. Scroll down and click 'Upload captions'
4. Select a  supported captions file from your hard drive

If the captions were uploaded successfully, you'll see a closed captions button ('CC') next to the full-screen button in the bottom-right corner. Click the CC button and start the video. 

Supported file formats

ThingLink currently supports two types of subtitle and caption files: SubRip (.srt) and WebVTT (.vtt). You can learn more about these file formats here and here.

Note that:

• the file must be encoded in UTF-8 (usually the default encoding for text files).
• ThingLink will ignore styling or position instructions included in the caption files.
• The file cannot contain more than 65000 characters. 

Updating closed captions

If you would like to update or replace the captions you've already uploaded, simply use the 'Remove captions' button under in-editor settings and upload a new file.

Limitations & considerations

• Closed captions can be uploaded for base videos only. It is not possible to add captions to videos you upload into text & media tags. However, if you need to add close captions to a video inside a tag, you can upload that video to ThingLink as a separate project, add closed captions to it and then embed it into a hotspot in your main project.
• Closed captions can be uploaded to 2D videos only. It is not possible to upload captions for 360-degree videos yet. 
• Mobile & responsiveness considerations: captions take up a significant portion of the screenspace, so they may obstruct hotspots or significant parts of the video on mobile. You can instruct your viewers to view the videos in fullscreen if they'd like to use closed captions.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter an error when uploading a captions file or the file uploads but the captions do not appear, please share the link to your project and the captions file with our support team here.