TikTok’s new captions and translation features are all about accessibility

By Anita George July 21, 2022

Following along with those TikTok cooking videos or other content might get a little easier with the short-form video platform’s newest features.

On Thursday, TikTok announced via a blog post that it would begin the rollout of three new accessibility and translation features for its wildly popular videos. These new features include auto-generated captions, translations for video descriptions and captions, and even translations for those text stickers people add to their TikTok videos.

Two smartphones showing a TikTok video before and after captions are added. — TikTok

With the auto-generated captions feature, TikTok users will be able to enable closed captions for the videos they watch, as well as the ones they create.

In addition to auto-captions, TikTok will also be rolling out two new translation features, one for video captions and descriptions and another for those handy text stickers that creators will often add to their videos to provide more context.

Two smartphones showing a TikTok video before and after translated captions, descriptions, and text stickers have been added. — TikTok

According to TikTok’s announcement, these new accessibility features are expected to “support an initial batch of languages including English, Portuguese, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Turkish.”

While TikTok is announcing the above features today, they’re not necessarily widely available to all users just yet. TikTok says that the rollout is still “at the early stages” and for now, they’re only “available on select videos at this time.”

Accessibility is increasingly gaining importance in the world of social media. And TikTok isn’t the only platform that’s beefing up its accessibility tools. In fact, Twitter recently announced the launch of at least two other accessibility features for the bird app: alt text reminders and a closed captioning toggle for Android and iOS.

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