Emma J. McDonnell
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
As user-generated video dominates media landscapes, it poses an accessibility challenge. While disability advocacy groups globally have secured hard-won accessibility regulations for broadcast media, no such regulation of user-generated content exists. Yet, one major player in this shift, TikTok, has a culture of user-generated, creative captioning. We sought to understand how TikTok videos are captioned and the impact current practices have on those who need captions to access audio content. Therefore, we conducted a content analysis of 300 open-captioned TikToks and contextualized these findings by interviewing nine caption users. We found that the current state of TikTok captioning does facilitate access to the platform but that a user-generated, social video-specific standard for captioning could improve caption quality and expand access. We contribute an empirical account of the state of TikTok captioning and outline steps toward a standard for user-generated captioning.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642177
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)