New Feature Alert! Auto-Captioning on TikTok

The social networking app TikTok announced a new feature today that will make strides forwards towards accessibility and inclusivity on the platform: an autocaptioning feature for videos, as reported on the tech website Gizmodo as well as others. Creators can now choose to have their videos autocaptioned by the app using a captioning algorithm, either when creating the video or after it has posted -- a great boon for creators who want to make their back catalog of content also accessible. Creators will also have the option to make small edits to the captions easily on the site, a helpful feature particularly for things such as as proper nouns or slang, which the captioning algorithm might not have in its library of knowledge. Creators can also choose to turn off the feature in the app's settings. Captioning is only initially available in American English and Japanese, but Gizmodo writer Shoshana Wodinsky notes that the company plans to add additional languages in "the coming months."

The press release from TikTok itself highlighted a few other changes they were making to promote accessibility within their app. Additional changes to the app up until this point have included making thumbnails animated instead of static images; a warning that pops up to notify creators if they are making a video with effects that might trigger photosensitive epilepsy in their viewers; a setting that allows a viewer to skip content that has been identified as containing photosensitive effects, which is important for people with photosensitive epilepsy; and a text-to-speech feature that converts written text into an audio effect.

Before this change, users were able to manually add text and captions to their videos. This was somewhat tedious, as they would need to place each text box and type in the text throughout the video, but it did give them the option to make their videos more accessible. This Distractify tutorial on how to manually add captions notes that videos with captions are more likely to go viral, which is an incentive for some creators to go that extra step. For those who wanted accessibility (or just a chance at having their video go viral,) there are some companies such as Rev.com or third-party apps such as CaptionExpert that would caption videos for them, usually for a fee.

I think this is a fantastic addition to the app. By making it so that inclusive, accessible content is easier to produce and publish, it will hopefully become the norm within the culture of TikTok to make accessible content. There are many reasons why someone might prefer captions on the TikToks they watch -- they may be deaf or hard of hearing, they may have an auditory processing disorder, they might be watching videos somewhere where it is noisy or where it would be rude or inappropriate to have audio playing, just to name a few -- and this change makes it so that so much more of the content on the app can be available to them.