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How to Add Captions to Instagram Stories, Reels and More!

Learn how to add closed captions to your Instagram Stories and Reels and pick up more tips on accessibility on Instagram.

Posted 2 years ago
how to add closed captions to instagram

Written by

Julia Cohen
Posted 2 years ago
As Instagram becomes more and more accessible, it continues to include features that allow creators to make their content more user-friendly – like adding closed captions to your content. This is a great way of not only making your videos even more relatable to an even wider audience but can also help with your discoverability and organic reach.
If you’re an avid user of Instagram Stories, you probably create content that features some form of talking, whether it’s a voiceover, or you speaking directly to the camera. And even if you talk A LOT, you don’t have to fret, because adding closed captions to your content doesn’t mean you have to type out every single word manually.

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  1. How to add closed captions to Instagram Stories 📕

How to add closed captions to Instagram Stories 📕

Instagram actually has a feature on Stories that auto-generates closed captions based on the audio content of your video. From there, you can read through what the platform has auto-generated, and edit any words or phrases it may have missed or got wrong. Here’s how:
  1. Upload an Instagram Story that features talking audio.
  2. In the editor mode, swipe up to the section where you would usually find polls, stickers, location tags, and hashtags.
  3. Select “captions.”
  4. Instagram will automatically transcribe the audio, which you can click to edit or change the color and font of the text.
  5. Select done, resize the text how you’d like it, and you’re finished!
Instagram closed captions how to

How to add closed captions to Instagram Reels 📹

Instagram has placed a huge focus on Reels content, and most users are seeing this fast video format perform extremely well in comparison to other content on the platform. As Reels are also video-based, you may include voiceovers or direct talking from time to time, and Instagram has made it easy to add closed captions to the current favorite format of the moment:
  1. Upload or record a Reel, which features a voiceover or talking audio.
  2. When you’re happy with the video, click through to Preview Mode.
  3. Select the stickers option, and click on “captions.”
  4. From here, you can edit or change the automatically transcribed audio to fit your video.
  5. Select done, resize the text how you’d like it, and you’re finished!
how to closed captions instagram

How to make your Instagram content more accessible 👀

As Instagram continues to make positive changes to its platform in order to increase accessibility for its users, it’s great as a content creator to be forward-thinking, and start considering this in your own posts and videos. Read our full blog post on being accessible here. Here are a few tips that are easy to implement for making your content a little more accessible and user-friendly!
  1. Make sure any text you use is legible and readable. It’s all well and good including text and closed captions on your content, but you want to make sure your users can actually read it! Text should be large enough to view, and in a color that stands out from the background, or against a solid background that contrasts with the text color. For example, many people find it difficult to read red writing on a blue background, so to be safe you should try and pick contrasting colors like black and white that aren’t too bright.
  2. Add visual cues to your content. Aside from text, you can make your video content more fun to follow by adding visual cues like stickers, polls, or images as well as sound effects.
  3. Add “alternative text” to your posts. Alt text is displayed or transmitted when your image or video hasn’t loaded properly, or if someone is visually impaired. By adding accurate alt text that describes your image, you are not only helping users understand your content, but you are also helping Instagram understand the type of content you create. This has been said to help propel content towards more specific, targeted audiences, increasing discoverability and organic growth.
  4. Make any references, links, or documents accessible. If you reference any content that isn’t your own, or useful links your followers may want to check out, you should consider making this information easy to locate, via a link in your bio, or Linktree for example.
  5. Consider your use of emojis. Believe it or not, different emojis actually mean different things. For example, multiple emojis showcase ‘cars’ but their text translation is very different and can have different connotations. For example:
🚗 = automobile
🚘 = oncoming automobile
Aside from learning how to add closed captions to Instagram Stories, Reels, and more, we hope we’ve given you a little more food for thought on how you can optimize the way you create and publish content to make it more accessible. If you’d like to learn something new that we haven’t yet covered in our Instagram toolkit, send us a DM on Instagram! And, if you want to learn more tips and tricks that could help you increase your organic Instagram growth by 40%, check out our free Instagram hashtag guide by clicking the banner below.
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How to add closed captions to Instagram Stories 📕

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How to make your Instagram content more accessible 👀


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