Making Media More Accessible - Captioning Instagram Stories

While video and audio media are great at getting your message out to your existing and new audiences, your media output isn’t working properly if it’s excluding people. In this series of articles, Making Media More Accessible, I’ll be highlighting some easy fixes for making sure everyone can enjoy your content.

Filming short videos on Instagram Stories are a great way to give your audience an insight behind the scenes of your brand. But not all of your audience can hear what is being said. The simple solution to this problem is to caption your stories.

When I surveyed my followers on Instagram last week, only 50% of respondents were captioning their stories and of those, 40% were still captioning by hand. Doing so really slows down the Story-ing process, and can put you off sharing in a casual, off the cuff manner.

The good news is that there are some great apps available to help you caption your short videos easily and quickly.

If you’re an iPhone user like me, your phone comes ready loaded with the Clips app. The latest iOS update 14.1 included some great changes to this app. You can now chose the aspect ratio of your video (it used to only record in square mode) and the filters section has a captions option with editable text in a number of formats.

When I want to record a new Story, I just record it in Clips with the live captions selected. Edit the text if necessary, (it’s pretty accurate with my accent, so most likely edits are names) and then export the video to my photo library. From there I just upload the video to my Stories, Instagram automatically splits it into segments and it’s ready to go.

If you’re an Android user, there are plenty of options for you too.

Google Pixel owners have access to Live Caption, which works very similarly to the iOS Clips app. It’s only available on Android 10 for Pixels so far, but there is talk of it being rolled out to other Android phones with the Android 11 update.

AutoCap is a very popular choice for Android users. Its great advantage is that you can import videos to caption, rather than having to record them in-app. You will need to pay for it to get rid of the ads and watermark though.

Whichever app you use to caption your Stories, make sure you choose a clear font, and a high contrast background so that your text is as readable as possible.