Video captions are important. To begin with, they can be a vital accessibility tool for people who are hard of hearing or deaf. In addition, captioning can be helpful for people who are in environments where they can’t use the audio and / or don’t have headphones available. Or who (like myself) occasionally like to chat during videos and use captions to keep track of what’s being said.

Before TikTok added automatic captions to its app in April of this year, a lot of TikTok creators were manually adding captions to their TikTok videos, either via the app’s text feature or by using third-party apps. However, that’s no longer necessary — the auto caption feature is now a part of TikTok, thanks to organizations such as The Deaf Collective, which worked with TikTok to develop the feature.

So, it’s a good idea to enable auto captions for all your videos. And don’t worry: if anybody watching one of your videos prefers not to have the captions on, they can easily shut them off (we’ll go into that in a moment).

Unfortunately, you can’t stylize your captions — you’re pretty much stuck with what you get, which tends to be white lettering on a slightly darkened rectangle. If you want to get fancy with your captions, then you’ll have to disable the auto caption feature (using the same Caption icon) and use the Text feature (which is at the bottom of the edit screen) to manually create captions in a variety of colors, sizes, and typefaces.

I personally love having captions on videos, but some people find them distracting. If you don’t want captions on your TikTok videos, you can disable them. (Of course, you won’t be actually getting rid of them, just hiding them on your device.)

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