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Disadvantages of Web-Based Captioning

Bear in mind that these are general statements – not all products share all disadvantages.

Requires all work online. This can be difficult if you do not have a good broadband connection or want to do your work away from an internet connection.
May require public videos. Some tools require a public URL to access your video – you cannot upload an unpublished video. Depending on your situation, that can impact your workflow or privacy issues.
May require third party URL. You have to use their URL to view your video with the captions. So while your video is located at (for example) http://www.yourorg.org/funvideo, to view the captioned version users have to access a different site, such as http://www.captioningtool.com/yourorg/funvideo. A possible concern with this is that you have no control over the captions; if their site goes down, your captions are lost.
May not allow saving before completion. You need to caption the entire program in a single online session. In some cases you can work around this by exporting the incomplete captions, then importing them to begin your next session.
May have limited customization options. Your choice of font type, color, size, background, and justification, among other elements, may be limited to the service's options. For example, it may only allow you to center or left justify captions. (Right justification is often used to link captions to a speaker on the right side of the screen.)
May be open caption only. This is often the case when the captions are hosted on a third-party site. Since that version has a unique URL you may not consider this a true disadvantage.
May not be accessible to screen readers. Some viewers, such as those who are deafblind, may rely on screen readers (software that reads browser text in Braille or out loud) to capture the captions, which is easier when the captions are a separate text file. Some sites generate captions as a graphics overlay, which may not be viewable to screen readers.