How to Keep Your Shorts Text From Being Covered by the YouTube UI

You frame a Short perfectly, put the subject dead-centre, add a caption along the bottom — and when it plays, half of it is buried under YouTube's buttons and title. The video is fine; the layout is the problem. The interface YouTube draws on top of every Short covers predictable parts of the frame, and anything important underneath is simply lost.

What the Shorts interface covers

When your video plays in the Shorts player, YouTube overlays its own controls on top of it. Three areas matter:

The right column — the like, dislike, comments, share and remix buttons, plus the sound disc, run up the right edge. Anything in that strip is partly hidden.
The bottom — your channel name, the video title, the description snippet and the "Shorts" label sit across the lower part of the screen. This band is opaque; text placed there is effectively invisible.
The top — a thin strip for the progress bar and, at times, a search or menu affordance.

The middle of the frame, slightly left of centre, is the area nothing covers. That is your safe zone — where faces, subjects and any words you need read should live.

Why "dead-centre" is a trap

Centring feels right, and for the subject it usually is. The trouble is text and secondary elements that drift low or right. A caption pinned to the bottom edge lands under the title bar. A logo in the bottom-right corner sits beneath the share button. A call-to-action along the lower third competes with the channel row. None of it is wrong in your editor — it only breaks once the player's UI appears, which is the one place you can't see while you edit.

How to check before you publish

The reliable way is to preview a real frame with the safe zones drawn on top. Export one representative frame of your Short as an image and drop it into our Shorts Safe Zone Checker. It marks the areas the buttons, title and captions cover, and outlines the region that stays clear, so you can see at a glance whether your subject and text survive. Because it runs in your browser, the frame — often from an unpublished video — never leaves your device.

Practical fixes

Raise your captions. Move any text you need read up out of the bottom band, roughly into the middle third.
Keep the right edge clear. Treat the right strip as reserved for YouTube. Put nothing there you'd mind losing.
Leave breathing room. The exact overlay size shifts a little between phones and app versions, so don't write right up to the edge of the safe box — leave a margin.
Design for the frame, not the export. A thumbnail that looks balanced full-bleed can feel lopsided once a third of it is covered; check the version viewers actually see.

The same idea applies to thumbnails

Regular 16:9 thumbnails have their own covered corner — the duration stamp sits bottom-right, and the outer edge can be cropped depending on where the thumbnail appears. The same checker has a thumbnail mode for that. The principle is identical: keep the essential stuff away from the parts the platform reserves for itself.

Frequently asked questions

Are the safe-zone margins exact?

No — YouTube doesn't publish pixel-perfect numbers, and the layout varies slightly by device and app version. Treat the zones as a practical margin of safety and leave yourself a little extra room beyond them.

Does this change how I export the video?

No. You still export a normal vertical 9:16 video. This is only about where in the frame you place important elements, so the interface doesn't cover them.

Is my frame or thumbnail uploaded when I check it?

No. The checker draws the image with a canvas in your own browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server — which matters here, because the image is usually one you haven't published yet.