TikTok, Text-to-Speech, and Accessibility
Note: open captions means captions that cannot be turned off. Closed captions mean captions that can be turned on or off. It’s an important difference, as open captions are less accessible than closed captions. The additional text always being on the screen can make it more difficult for certain neurodivergent people to focus and understand videos.
There’s an interesting twist to the TikTok accessibility debate. When we last discussed this, we learned about the novelty of Instagram Threads. This app linked to Instagram provides a free speech to open caption feature for social video. You can post the videos straight to your Instagram profile or download them to use in other apps like TikTok. The 15 second per clip limit suggests that Instagram developed the app for their TikTok clone Reels.
Now, TikTok has added its own unique accessibility feature. This is not the proper closed captioning system people have been requesting for years, but it is a distinct feature with a different practical application.
TikTok has text-to-speech narration now. Those text boxes that aren’t the most practical to create open captions in do work well for different storytelling styles. For example, there are trends where people take a popular song and re-contextualize it with the text boxes. Other people use it to add context or humor to videos. The text boxes can be used for great stylistic or narrative effect.
Now think about users who cannot read that text. They might be blind. They might have a processing disorder that makes reading difficult. They might be illiterate. Videos driven by on-screen text are not accessible to them. If a person can’t read the text boxes for whatever reason, they cannot understand these videos on the platform.
The text-to-speech feature is finicky to set up. After recording or uploading a video, you add a text box. Once you complete the text box, you click on the text box in the video. Then you can select the “Text-to-speech” option to have a digital voice read out whatever you wrote. Do this for each text box you want to use the feature on. If you change your mind, you can click on the box again and select “Cancel.”
There are a few things to discuss here. First, it is good that TikTok is finally adding some accessibility features. I’m not sure how practical they would be for creators who cannot see the UI, but it has the potential to make some popular video trends more accessible to a wider audience.
Second, there are still accessibility issues contained within this feature. You need to physically type to use it. TikTok does not accept speech-to-text to create captions or any text in the app; believe me, I’ve tried. It comes up as an option on my phone’s keyboard but does not produce text in the app. In order to use this potential accessibility feature, you have to manually type and edit the text boxes in the app. Not everyone can do this, which is why using the in-app text boxes is not a reasonable alternative to an open captioning feature.
Third, I’ve seen a good bit of discourse making fun of TikTok for providing this feature. What we should not do is turn this into the Accessibility Olympics. Yes, I’ve also focused on TikTok providing a meaningful closed captioning system in-app. That does not mean that I am going to make fun of or be aggressive towards the developers because a different accessibility option came first. I’m not saying TikTok as a corporation is petty; I’m saying that they are already resistant to significant changes and built their app on moderation policies that actively suppressed disabled creators. I will not discourage future changes by taunting them for servicing a different community’s accessibility needs.
Fourth, this very well may be the reaction to Instagram Threads. I haven’t seen another social video app include text-to-speech for on-screen text boxes before. Whether TikTok intended to add open captions is irrelevant; their competitor did it first. That had to hurt. A few weeks later, TikTok introduces their own unique feature that can be used for making videos more accessible. It’s not what we expected, but it is part of the app now. I can’t imagine open captions are far behind.
