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The negative impact of stylised captions on TikTok and Instagram

It used to be that there was not enough captioned content on social media. People were posting videos but not captioning them, either because it wasn’t possible on the platform at the time or because they couldn’t be bothered.

Auto captioning has become more and more popular, and it’s now quite simple to enable closed captions on your social media videos. As Courtney Craven puts it on their LinkedIn post, the resulting accuracy of caption can be “useless”.

But another problem is how the captions are displayed: there’s an increasing trend for captions to display

one

or two

words at

a time.

Courtney touches on some of the issues with that, as does accessibility consultant, Meryl Evans. This style of caption can be really hard to follow, and detract from the video itself, as one is so focussed on trying to keep up with the text. You understand language ‘as a unit’, not as one word at a time.

I don’t think we can blame the content creators; they’ve been given a tool, and they’re using it. But social media companies need to work harder to not build inaccessibility into the tools they provide people.

I’d be interested to know what kind of impact this has on screen reader users – send me an email if you have any insights!

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