How to add captions to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels

TikTok

1. Record or upload your video and open the editing tools.
2. Tap the auto captions icon. TikTok writes your speech out as captions.
3. Edit the caption text if a word is wrong.
4. Post the video. The captions appear once it is published, and viewers can turn them off from the share panel.

These steps are from a TikTok Newsroom post on accessibility (TikTok Newsroom, September 30, 2021); auto captions launched on April 6, 2021. The app's menus move over time, so look for Captions among the editing tools if the icon has changed.

Instagram Reels

1. Tap Create at the top, or swipe right anywhere in Feed.
2. At the bottom, tap Reel.
3. Select a video from your camera roll, then tap Next, and Next again.
4. At the bottom, tap More options.
5. Turn on Enable closed captions. Turn on Translate closed captions too if you want them translated for viewers.

Instagram uses speech recognition to write the speech out as text at the bottom of the reel. For a reel you've already posted, open it from your profile, tap Options, then Edit, then More options, and use the same toggles. Closed captions aren't available on computers (Instagram Help).

To place your own text instead, tap the text tool after choosing your clip, type, set the alignment, color, highlight and animation, then drag the text where you want it (Instagram Help).

YouTube Shorts

1. Upload the Short. YouTube makes automatic captions for Shorts in the same languages as long videos.
2. Sign in to YouTube Studio and open Subtitles.
3. Select the video, then use More next to the subtitles you want to change.
4. Fix any part that wasn't transcribed correctly.

YouTube says automatic captions can misrepresent speech because of mispronunciations, accents, dialects or background noise, and asks creators to review them (YouTube Help).

Facebook Reels

1. Add your video to a new reel.
2. Tap Captions. Facebook transcribes the audio into a caption on the reel.
3. Change the caption's font and color from the options at the bottom of the reels composer, then tap Done.

Since June 2025, every video posted to Facebook is shared as a reel (Meta Business Help). For a video on your profile, you can also upload a SubRip (.srt) caption file: edit the post, choose Edit from composer, then Add captions, then Upload (Facebook Help).

The app's captions or burned-in captions

If you burn captions in, turn the app's own captions off for that video, or the words show twice.

Making captions easy to read

• Keep captions inside the area the app's buttons don't cover. The safe zones guide gives the margins for a vertical video.
• Netflix's timed text style guide allows at most 42 characters a line, two lines, and up to 20 characters a second for adults (Netflix). For short-form video, treat those as the ceiling.
• Caption all the speech, say who is speaking when there is more than one voice, and include the sounds that matter, which is what WCAG 2.2 asks of captions (W3C).
• Read automatic captions before posting, and fix names, numbers and any word the app misheard.