Automatic captions are useful because they reduce transcription work. They are not a finished accessibility layer. Names, accents, technical terms and sentence boundaries often need a human pass. A beautifully animated caption that says the wrong word is still wrong.
Correct the transcript first
Transcribe the final spoken cut, not an earlier assembly. Fix names, numbers, brand terms and punctuation. Compare the transcript against the audio rather than against what you remember the speaker saying. Adobe documents the transcription-to-caption workflow as a sequence of separate steps.
Time captions to speech
Break lines at natural phrases. A caption should arrive when the phrase begins and leave when it ends. Avoid flashing a long sentence for a fraction of a second or keeping yesterday's phrase on screen during a new thought. After every structural edit, check timing again.
Design for legibility
Use a clear typeface, reliable contrast and a position away from platform controls. Animation can highlight a key word, but it should not make the whole line harder to read. Test at actual phone size and ordinary brightness.
Decide between embedded and selectable captions
Burned-in captions preserve the visual treatment across platforms. Separate caption tracks can give viewers more control and may be easier to revise or localize. The right choice depends on the destination and the delivery brief. Keep a clean master and an editable caption file even if the social export burns the words into the picture.
The goal is simple: someone watching without sound should still follow the point, and someone listening should never be distracted by inaccurate text. Caption quality is part of editing quality, not a final decorative pass.