User-Generated Captions

Captions created and added to video content by non-professional contributors — typically the video's own creator or community members — rather than by professional captioners or fully automated systems. On social media, user-generated captions are often implemented as open captions burned into the video and hand-placed on screen, giving creators control over styling, timing, and placement but producing uneven coverage, inconsistent accuracy, and frequent deviations from standardised captioning conventions. Research on TikTok and YouTube shows that user-generated captions can carry significant expressive and cultural value (emoji use, stylised typography, 'vibe text') while simultaneously creating accessibility gaps such as occlusion of speakers, untranscribed speech, and missing sound cues.