Caption a Facebook video for accessibility
Facebook auto-generates captions for a good share of native uploads, but coverage is inconsistent, and video cross-posted from elsewhere frequently loses its original captions entirely — which matters most for business and marketing accounts with a compliance obligation to caption their video content.
Transcribing the video directly produces a caption file you can attach regardless of what happened during a cross-post, plus a plain-text transcript for screen-reader users who need the content as page text rather than an in-player overlay.
- Doesn't depend on captions surviving a cross-post from another platform or ad network.
- SRT/VTT for a caption track; plain text for screen readers.
- Covers Facebook Live replays, which are easy to forget to caption after the fact.
Facebook specifics
- Typical length
- Ranges widely: short feed clips, longer creator/Page uploads, and Live replays that can run an hour or more.
- Worth knowing
- Business and marketing accounts are the heaviest users of Facebook video, and ad creative in particular is watched muted-first, which is why captioning matters more here than raw caption-availability numbers suggest.
Best formats for accessibility
- SRT — a closed-caption track
- VTT — a closed-caption track for web players
- TXT — a plain-text transcript published next to the video, for screen readers
Workflow
- Transcribe the Facebook video.
- Export SRT/VTT and attach it as the video's caption track.
- Also publish the plain-text transcript on the page — a screen reader can read page text directly, but it can't parse a caption track embedded in a video player.
FAQ
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More for Facebook
The free tier includes 15 minutes of video a month, AI transcripts in any language, and TXT/SRT/VTT/JSON export — enough to run one Facebook video through and see the output before committing to anything.