How to Generate Closed Captions in Articulate Storyline 360
By Devlin Peck · Updated
Part of the Articulate Storyline & xAPI Development guide
Storyline 360 can now generate closed captions for you automatically with AI Assistant, and you can also import SRT or VTT caption files. A third option is to write captions by hand in the built-in editor. This guide covers all three methods, plus how to review AI captions for accuracy, style them in the player, and meet the accessibility requirements that make captions non-optional for many projects.
Captions matter because learners who are deaf or hard of hearing depend on them, and everyone else benefits too: people watching with sound off, non-native speakers, and anyone following dense narration. Making your courses accessible is a core part of learning Articulate Storyline 360 properly, not an afterthought.
Works in Storyline 360, verified against Articulate's caption documentation (updated February through August 2026).
How do you generate closed captions in Articulate Storyline?
There are three ways: let AI Assistant generate captions automatically when you import audio or video, import a caption file (SRT, VTT, SBV, or SUB), or write them by hand in the built-in closed captions editor. Which one you should use depends on how much time you have and whether you already have a process for captioning your media.
| Method | Effort | When to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| AI Assistant auto-generation | Minutes: generate in the background, then review and approve | Fastest path to synced captions |
| Import a caption file (SRT, VTT, SBV, SUB) | Low, if you already have the file | When you have a different process / tool for generating captions |
| Built-in closed captions editor | Highest: type and sync every caption yourself | Short clips, precise manual control |
Whichever route you take, the finish line is the same: accurate, synced captions that learners can toggle from the player. The sections below walk through each method.
How do you generate captions with AI Assistant in Storyline 360?
Import your audio or video and Storyline will prompt you to generate captions automatically; you then review and approve them before publishing. The full workflow is documented in Articulate's AI-generated captions guide, and it looks like this:
Insert your audio or video
Add media the way you normally would: the Insert tab on the ribbon, drag and drop onto the slide, or insert from the Media Library. Supported audio formats are OGG, WAV, and MP3; supported video formats are MP4, MOV, and AVI.
Click Generate Captions at the prompt
As soon as the media imports, AI Assistant asks whether you want captions (it skips videos with no audible dialogue). Click Generate Captions. Check Remember my choice for future imports if you want this to happen automatically every time.
Keep working while captions process
Caption generation runs in the background. A "Processing" indicator appears in the status bar at the lower right, and clicking it shows every captioning job in the queue. You can keep building slides while it works.
Click Review when processing completes
When the indicator switches to "Processing complete," click Review in the notification (or the View link next to the media's name) to open the captions for approval. If a job fails, click Retry or follow the specific error message.
If you dismissed the prompt, you can still generate captions later. Here's how: right-click the media and choose Closed Captions > Generate, click Generate with AI on the Audio Tools or Video Tools tab, or chat with AI Assistant to caption multiple files in one step. For bulk jobs, open the Accessibility Checker (from the View tab or the Accessibility Issues link in the status bar), expand the Captions added row, and click Generate captions for all.
Articulate built in two guardrails. First, captions generate in whatever language is spoken in the media, so multilingual courses get captions per file. Second, if you open the publish window with unapproved captions, Storyline surfaces a link to the Accessibility Checker so you can review them first. This approval gate exists for a reason, which brings us to the next section.
How do you review and fix AI-generated captions?
AI-generated captions are a draft: open the closed captions editor, check them against the audio, then click Approve. Generating captions used to be the time sink. Now the generation is trivial and the review is the actual skill, because a machine transcript that nobody checked could cause problems for learners and reviewers alike.
AI-generated captions are a draft, not a deliverable. It's your job to review them.
You can open the editor from Manage Captions on the Audio Tools or Video Tools tab, from the Needs Review button in the Media Library's Captions panel, or from the Generated captions reviewed row in the Accessibility Checker. Articulate's built-in editor guide covers every control in detail.
While you review, check for the errors machine transcription makes most often:
- Proper nouns and jargon. Product names, acronyms, and industry terms are the first things AI mangles. Read them against your script.
- Speaker identification. The editor doesn't support voice tags, so identify speakers by typing their names with colons before their lines ("Adam: E-learning is powerful."). Imported voice tags convert to this format automatically.
- Line breaks and caption splits. Break lines at natural phrase boundaries, and use Split Caption when one placeholder carries too much text for its duration.
- Timing. Drag placeholder edges so captions stay in sync with the audio and remain on screen long enough to read.
- Non-speech information. Meaningful sound effects and music descriptions belong in captions too; transcription models often skip them.
If you want a standard to measure against, the DCMP Captioning Key is the widely recognized benchmark for caption quality. It says quality captions are accurate (errorless is the goal), consistent, clear (including speaker IDs and non-speech information), readable (on screen long enough to read, in sync, not obscuring the visuals), and equal (the meaning and intent of the material fully preserved).
One bonus for your effort: Storyline 360 automatically generates synchronized video transcripts from your captions, so a clean caption track gives you a second accessibility feature for free.
How do you import an SRT or caption file into Storyline?
Select the media, go to the Options tab on the ribbon, and click Import in the Closed Captions section, then choose your SRT, VTT, SBV, or SUB file. This is the path if you use an external captioning service; Articulate's caption import guide names YouTube, Amara, and 3Play Media as examples. There are two routes:
Route 1: Auto-import alongside your media
Give the caption file the same name as the media file and store it in the same folder (MyVideo.mp4 with MyVideo.srt, for example). When you import the media into Storyline, the captions import and sync automatically.
Route 2: Import after the fact
Select the audio track or video on the slide, open the Options tab, and click Import in the Closed Captions section. Browse to your caption file and click Open. You can also import from inside the closed captions editor, which replaces any existing captions for the media.
Three formatting tips from Articulate's docs will save you troubleshooting time. Encode caption files as UTF-8, or special characters will render as symbols. A single line break in the file forces a wrap at a specific point, while two line breaks split the text into two caption boxes that display at the same time (useful for two speakers). And only bold, italic, and underline formatting survive the import; fonts and colors in the file are ignored, because styling happens in the player settings instead.
Before AI Assistant existed, a common free workaround was uploading the course narration to YouTube, letting YouTube auto-generate and sync the captions, downloading the SRT file, and importing it into Storyline. This still works as a fallback, but with one caveat: you're uploading your course audio to YouTube, so don't use it for proprietary or confidential content. The video below walks through this workflow from start to finish.
Captions flow out of Storyline too. Exporting from the editor produces a VTT file, and File > Export > Closed Captions exports every caption track in the project at once. This powers the localization workflow: export each track, translate the file, and reimport it via the same Options > Import button. Note that captions are excluded when you export your course's text strings for translation, so this export-translate-reimport loop is the way to localize them.
How do you style and control captions in the Storyline player?
Caption colors, font, size, and position live in the player properties under Colors & Effects, and the closed captioning button is on by default so learners toggle captions themselves. Open Home > Player, click Colors & Effects, and use the Closed Captions options to set foreground and background colors, font, font size, position, and whether text has a shadow.
The CC button behavior confuses a lot of developers: it only appears when the current slide or layer actually has captions. It disappears on slides without them, which is by design (it cues learners that captions are available). If you're building custom controls or using accessible video controls, uncheck the Captions box in the player properties to hide the button entirely.
You can also drive captions with triggers through the built-in Player.DisplayCaptions variable, which is True when captions display and False when they don't. To turn captions on by default for everyone, add this trigger to your first slide: Action Adjust variable, Operator = Set, Variable Player.DisplayCaptions, Value True, When Timeline starts on that slide. Because it's a variable like any other, you can also react when learners change it. If you're tracking learner behavior, you can fire a statement whenever the caption toggle flips by sending custom xAPI statements from Storyline.
Are closed captions legally required in eLearning?
If your training falls under Section 508 or your organization targets WCAG conformance, yes. WCAG Success Criterion 1.2.2 is a Level A requirement: captions must be provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media, unless the media is a clearly labeled alternative for text. Level A is the floor of WCAG conformance, so a narrated course without captions fails at the first hurdle.
For US federal work, Section508.gov's synchronized media guidance applies SC 1.2.2 to prerecorded content and SC 1.2.4 to live content. In practice, government contracts and many enterprise procurement teams treat captioning as a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.
The approval step is where a generated transcript becomes a deliverable you can stand behind.
What else makes a Storyline course accessible?
Captions are one layer: run Storyline's Accessibility Checker and pair captions with transcripts and accessible media controls. The Accessibility Checker (introduced above for bulk caption generation) also flags missing alt text and other issues across the whole project, and the synchronized video transcripts Storyline builds from your captions give learners a second way to consume narrated content. Tool choice plays a role here too. For information-heavy courses you may be weighing Storyline against Rise, and the two handle captions and media differently.
Finally, always test the published output. Captions that look right in Preview can behave differently in a browser, so publish, load the course where learners will actually take it, and toggle the CC button yourself. If you need somewhere to put the published files, here's how to upload and share your eLearning projects. And once your course is accessible, you can keep building on it with more advanced interactions, like this guide to developing a chatbot in Articulate Storyline.
Frequently asked questions
Why isn't the CC button showing on my Storyline player?
The closed captioning button only appears when the current slide or layer has captions; it disappears on slides without them. If it never appears, confirm the Captions box is checked in your player properties and that your media actually has a caption track attached.
Why are characters in my captions showing up as strange symbols?
Your caption file isn't encoded as UTF-8. Re-save the SRT or VTT file with UTF-8 encoding in any text editor and import it again.
Why won't AI Assistant generate captions from my MP3 file?
MP3 is a supported format, so first update Storyline 360 from the Articulate 360 desktop app: a community-reported bug where MP3 caption generation failed (notably in the French UI) was fixed in Update 102 in July 2025. Also confirm the file contains audible speech, since AI Assistant skips media without detectable dialogue.
Can teammates without AI Assistant open my project?
Yes. On the latest version of Storyline 360, teammates can view and even approve unapproved AI captions without AI Assistant enabled. On older versions, they can't open the project until you approve the captions and resave the file.
How do I caption a video with two speakers?
Type each speaker's name with a colon before their line ("Lucy: And it's transforming lives."), since the editor doesn't support voice tags. In a caption file, add two line breaks to split the speakers into separate caption boxes that display at the same time.
Do captions export with my course text for translation?
No. Captions are excluded from Storyline's text-string translation export. Instead, export each media's captions as a VTT file (or use File > Export > Closed Captions for the whole project), translate the files, and reimport them.