Liam O’Dell: Other social media sites should follow Facebook’s use of captions

Just over a month ago, Facebook-owned Instagram announced that it was to launch its own feature for sharing longer video content. While videos within the main area of Instagram were limited to a certain timeframe, IGTV allowed for full-length videos in vertical format to be shared with a creator’s audience.

This is all well and good, I thought, but where are the captions?

Sure, expecting such a feature to be rolled out so soon after its launch may be somewhat premature, but when one looks at Facebook and its role in boosting the popularity of captions on social media, you have to wonder whether they will continue to lead the charge with this latest project.

After all, take a scroll down Facebook today and the statuses that used to flood the site years ago are now replaced with mostly pictures, GIFs and videos. Social media now is all visual, fast and instantaneous, and so you would think that the process of editing in captions is considered too laborious and time-consuming for brands and creators.

Not on Facebook.

As the Zuckerberg-owned site continues to come under fire for its algorithm and how it manages content, there is one positive thing for which the system is responsible: that’s making subtitled videos a necessity.

With videos ‘autoplaying’ on the News Feed with no sound until the user actively clicks on it, the first few seconds of a video are vital for brands when it comes to catching an audience’s attention on Facebook. Spoken dialogue is no use at the start of a video without sound, so that’s where the captions come in.

In essence, videos on Facebook are reduced to nothing more than a glamorised PowerPoint presentation, with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen displaying subtitles as a series of images and videos start playing.

What’s interesting here is that in those first few seconds before a hearing person unmutes the video, they are, in effect, having the same experience as a deaf viewer. It shows that captions can become useful for hearing people too, and at a time when they still get criticised for their intrusiveness, it’s this sort of accessibility which we need more of.

While this may all work fine on Facebook, the popularity of captioned videos hasn’t really transferred over to other sites such as Twitter and YouTube – even in terms of commercial content. Why? Most probably because of a mixture of practicalities and underlying attitudes towards captioning which are yet to be properly addressed.

First of all, while Facebook’s timeline is no longer chronological, Twitter is (for now) and with that, comes a need for everything to be snappy and for content to be churned out constantly. There’s no time for captions when there’s an underlying need for us to keep our audiences informed regularly on what we’re up to. Also, let’s not forget that those using Twitter for fun aren’t as worried about captions as brands which want to reach out to as many people as possible. Such is the weird way in which the hearing world works.

Yet, this mindset is probably what leads to the next stage: a sense of laziness or the argument that captioning content is now ‘too laborious’. Granted, online content creators can have busy lifestyles, but even then, that shouldn’t be an excuse for not making videos accessible.

YouTubers Rikki Poynter and Jessica Kellgren-Fozard have both been fantastic in terms of leading the charge on this, repeatedly calling out YouTube’s appalling automatic captions feature whilst asking more content creators to start subtitling their content. Concerns that the process takes too long or is too complicated are quickly addressed by the two YouTubers, who have made videos and given talks breaking down the process and offering solutions.

Facebook has done a great job of raising the profile of captions on social media, but when it comes to expanding this out to other platforms, we need to call on these sites to introduce (or streamline) more accessibility features. Also, perhaps more importantly, we must continue to call on brands and creators to subtitle content across all social media, and tackle the misconceptions about captioning as and when they arise.

Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and blogger from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and makes the occasional video about deaf awareness on his YouTube channel. He can also be found talking about disability, politics, theatre, books and music on his Twitter, or on his blog, The Life of a Thinker.