The Basics of Facebook Live Captions & Why Everyone Should Use Them

Let’s talk about Facebook Live and Captioning. Some of you may be coming here for the HOW while others are interested in the WHY. I’ll address those, plus the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE as well.

Let’s do this in 5W1H order to be tidy.

WHO

Who should be using auto-captions on Facebook? In my opinion, everyone.

First off, approximately 15% of Americans over the age of 18 report some sort of trouble hearing¹. Plus, one in eight people in the U.S. (roughly 13%) ages 12+ have hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations.² Thinking internationally? Around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss.³

That should be enough right there, but in case you need more…

Captions are not only critical for your Deaf or hard of hearing audience, they are greatly beneficial to your hearing audiences as well. They benefit:

• Those for whom English is a second language.
• Those with differing accents from the main speaker (example: in the theater world, many Americans enjoy captioning for productions out of England or Scotland, because the accents and fast speaking can make it hard to comprehend).
• Those who are taking notes for education/lecture purposes.
• Those who do not listen to videos on Facebooks with sound. This is a LOT more people than you think. They’re in bed with a spouse who’s asleep, they’re on the subway with no earbuds, they’re at work and shouldn’t be watching videos, they’re holding a baby who finally just fell asleep, or they simply choose not to turn on their sound.

There are so many reasons to add captions to your Facebook Live videos. You’ll expand your audience and be more inclusive. Win win! 🙌

WHAT

Captions are the small words that appear at the bottom of your screen when you’re watching a video, which show what the people on the screen are saying. They are sometimes referred to as captioning, closed captioning, subtitles, surtitles, or CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation). Note: surtitles are technically a totally different thing, but unless you work in opera you’re probably not here for that lecture.

Captions are typically categorized as either human-generated or computer-generated. Let’s start with the category differences.

Human-Generated

These captions are created by a person listening to and recording down all of the words, exactly how they are spoken, in the timing in which they are spoken. They are THE most accurate method to use.

If money, time, and resources are no obstacle, you should always choose human-generated. There are subtleties to the English spoken language which can not always be picked up by computers. We’ll get to that in the next section.

• PRO: most accurate option.
• CON: not always cost effective and cannot always be arranged immediately (i.e. you need to hire someone or a service to do this, so an impromptu Facebook Live might not be possible).

Computer-Generated

These captions are generated through ASR technology (Automatic Speech Recognition). Basically a computer listens to the video and tries to recognize the speech. If you have a speaker who uses “umm” a lot (hi, me 🙋‍♀️) or has a stutter or speech disorder, this can be particularly problematic because the computer will not pick up on this the way a human will.

But, when money, time, or resources ARE an obstacle, computer-generated captions are better then not doing captioning at all.

• PRO: cost effective (free!) and built into Facebook’s video and Live platforms.
• CON: they will never be as accurate as hiring a professional captioner to caption your video.

WHEN

When should you be using auto-captions for Facebook Live? In my opinion, every time.

Chances are that even if you don’t think you have someone who uses captioning, you probably do. Not convinced? Head back to the top of the page and reread the WHO section again.

Personal story time… When I first started hosting a weekly Facebook Live for my stationery shop, I didn’t include captions. Yes, I’ve worked on and off in accessibility for years and I ABSOLUTELY know better, but I’ll plead it-was-March-2020-when-COVID-began and also I’m-a-human-who-messes-up-sometimes. When I did remedy this though, I received several messages and comments from people thanking me! One person watched while she was on call at the hospital. Other frequently had a sleepy baby in her arms during the timeframe of our show. One said her mom was now watching because she could follow along more clearly. That’s three customers I may have lost and those are just the ones who reached out to me!

WHERE + HOW

Ok, now that you’re convinced that captions are always the way to go, let’s get down to the technical stuff. WHERE to find auto-caption settings on Facebook and HOW to use them.

Before I begin, let me note that I’m writing this in January 2021. Facebook changes CONSTANTLY and while I’ll attempt to keep this as up-to-date as possible, it could be out of date by the time I hit publish. #becausetechnology

TURNING ON CAPTIONS

When you’re in the main Facebook Live Producer screen, scroll down to the bottom of the screen until you see the Settings box, next to a little gear icon.

From there, click the v shaped arrow to the right of “Viewing” to open more options. Where you see the option for Turn on auto-generated captions, toggle the switch to the right so that it appears blue (and is therefore turned on).

EDITING CAPTIONS AFTER THE LIVE

Now that you’ve successfully gone Live and entertained or informed your viewers, it’s time to clean up and correct those computer-generated captions. Because remember, they’re free and easy but they aren’t as accurate as human-generated.

Head to your video. It should be in your Business Page’s feed or you can typically find it under the Live section of your page. NOTE: If you did not select to have your Facebook Live saved for future viewing, it is not going to appear in any of those places.

Once you find the video, click on it so that it takes up the whole screen. You may see a stream of comments to the right.

In the upper right hand corner of your screen you should see three little black dots on a white circle. Click those to get the following menu:

From here click the Edit video option with the two little gears.

To the right you’ll see a Captions menu item. Click that.

Once clicked you’ll see the first option is Autogenerate Captions. This may seem counter intuitive, because didn’t you already click this before you even went Live? Yes, it’s confusion. But stay with us.

Click Autogenerate next to the magic wand icon. Depending on how long your video is, this may take some time.

Once that’s complete, you should have the option to edit.

EDITORS NOTE (1/21/21): It appears Facebook can be a little finicky with this option. While it used to work just fine for me, the newest update of either Facebook or Chrome has made it glitchy (I’m on a Mac). When I open it in Safari, it says the browser doesn’t even support caption editing so I’m stuck there as well currently. Boo.

ALTERNATIVE OPTION

I actually like this option better if you can swing it — it’s kind of the best of both worlds. If you need to go Live and can’t get it human captioned at the time, but can have a professional captioner watch the replay, they can supply you with an SRT file to upload. Basically, instead of clicking on Autogenerate in this last step above, you would upload the file with the captions.

RESOURCES

1. Blackwell DL, Lucas JW, Clarke TC. Summary health statistics for U.S. adults: National Health Interview Survey, 2012 (PDF). National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 10(260). 2014.
2. Lin FR, Niparko JK, Ferrucci L. Hearing loss prevalence in the United States.(link is external) [Letter] Arch Intern Med. 2011 Nov 14; 171(20): 1851–1852.
3. World Health Organization. March 2020.