On Captioning Social Video
For years, TikTok users have been asking TikTok to add a captioning feature to the social video making app. TikTok so far has ignored the requests. It is frustrating, for sure, since the TikTok video making features are actually pretty advanced and robust.
I make it a point to caption all of my videos. It is a lot of work regardless of which option I use outside of the framework of TikTok to make my daily videos. Here are just a few of the options I’ve used since joining the app at the start of quarantine:
Captioning by hand in the TikTok app. There’s an option to add text in boxes in the app. You can’t pause the video once you’re in this feature, so a lot of captioning is done quickly with a phone keyboard in small bursts, with up to 59 seconds of wait time before you can finish that sentence. Only so many words can realistically fit on the screen and only so many boxes can be used in a single video. It’s awful.
Create a video in TikTok, publish it as a private video, download the video with the obnoxious TikTok watermark, run it through an external captioning program, reupload the video to TikTok, and release it that way. I hate that watermark so much.
Film the video outside of TikTok, edit it with a second app, caption it with a third app, upload it to TikTok, and have it sit in TikTok timeout jail because the app flags videos made outside of the app for additional review before releasing them to the general population. This is, sadly, the most efficient method of creating videos and it results in your content never reaching a wide audience because you miss the critical first hour of views and interaction after publishing.
I don’t even want to get into how inaccurate every auto-captioning app. The advantage to those instead of starting from scratch is the auto-captioning apps building the SRT.txt file timings for you. A 59 second video takes me at least 10 minutes to accurately caption with the limitations of speech to text technology.
I bring this up at all because Instagram, the worst social video app in the world, introduced in-app captioning yesterday. The app that can do this is Threads by Instagram. Originally designed as a kind of private messenger/Snapchat clone, Threads limits the audience for messages to who you want them to be seen by. Threads also has a robust, in-app captioning featuring now that works surprisingly well. It’s not the most accessible as you have to press and hole the record button to shoot the video, but if you can do that, the captions appear on their own.
It took three months of Instagram Reels existing for Instagram/Facebook to hear the users and add in captioning options on their platform. It’s easy to import Threads to any other Instagram feature, including Reels. It’s actually pretty great. It captions while you record and even censors out bad words with bleeps and random special characters. I think the inconsistent font size and follow the bouncing ball style captions can be distracting for some people, but it’s a starting point.
It’s definitely better than TikTok’s one-two punch of not caring about accessibility on their app. The first punch is the lack of captioning; the second punch is still enforcing a policy that actively suppresses content by disabled creators.
Don’t ever forget about that. To solve bullying on the app, TikTok actively suppresses content from marginalized communities, so disabled, fat, queer, and BIPOC creators aren’t seen enough to be bullied. The app is filled with white supremacist content in the right corners, but heaven forbid we moderate people campaigning for the destruction of non-white people. No, it’s better to ignore them and actively punish people for what they look or sound like on the app.
Anyway, expect TikTok to finally care enough to offer some broken captioning system in the next month or so since so many big creators are straight up using Reels to film in now and letting their audience know. I prefer more control, so I will continue to use apps like Clipomatic (automatically generates captions word by word that appear one at a time on the screen), MixCaptions (automatically generates captions that appear in a more tradition closed captioning format but can be moved on screen), Kapwing (web based suite of video editing apps including captioning), and ContentFries (web based social video creation/editing app that resizes your content for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. and offers captioning options) to caption my videos.
Accessibility matters and sometimes we have to fight dirty to get it.
