TikTok Getting Closed Captions Soon

TikTok is finally taking another step towards accessibility on their massive social media platform. In the past week, they have given certain large creators in the beta testing program access to voice to text captioning features.

So why haven’t you seen it yet? It’s not as bad as it might seem. TikTok took the criticism to heart about a captioning system and built a working closed captioning system. This is the more accessible option for a wider range of people if they make it clear the option exists when the product finally launches.

Closed captions are captions the end user can toggle on and off. Open captions are captions that are permanently rendered into the video. Right now, I and many other creators are creating videos off-app to produce open captions so deaf and hard-of-hearing users can understand our videos at all. However, these open captions can be a distraction to other users. There are people who can be so distracted by the changing text onscreen (especially in that Threads-style one word at a time captioning) that they can’t understand what you’re saying in the video.

Currently on TikTok, if you don’t provide your own captioning, your videos are inaccessible to entire groups of people. If you do provide your own captioning, you can turn other users away who become distracted or overwhelmed by their presence. You can attempt to mitigate this by using captions that appear in a less active area of the frame (my videos have always had them on the top quarter to third of the screen, away from my face or any action in the video) and appear two lines at a time (not word by word), but that still doesn’t work for everyone.

The reason the captions beta doesn’t show for everyone is that they’re proper closed captions. Every user is going to have to opt in to use the captions under their accessibility settings. They can also toggle them on and off, video by video. Every creator who wants to provide captions (and everyone should once this launches) has to either toggle the captions on for every video or permanently turn them on in their settings.

That means TikTok has not rolled out the menu options to all users yet. You can’t turn something on and off that isn’t available in your version of the app yet. Once TikTok feels confident with the results of the beta, it will roll out more and more. Look at the text to speech feature they created a few months ago, which makes written captions more accessible to blind or vision impaired users. After the beta, the feature went down the line based on account size until they offered it to everyone.

I’ve written a lot about TikTok failing to offer these options in the past. I’m pleasantly surprised that they took in the feedback and created a meaningful closed captioning system. Most social media platforms do not and require users to take an all-or-nothing approach on video content. As someone who watches any media at home with captions on for a variety of reasons, I’m excited to see this finally implemented on TikTok.

Now we can focus on getting TikTok to handle its epidemic of hate speech, racism, misogyny, and suppression of anyone who points out these massive faults in their platform.