How to disable automatic closed captions in Safari on macOS?

Question

How to disable automatic closed captions in Safari on macOS?

I am frequently having a problem in MacOS Safari but not in other browsers, so it must be a setting issue, but for the life of me I can not figure out what setting to change. M1 Mini, macOS 15.7.4

I am getting automatically generated closed-captions on some internet videos, for example the one on this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/funnycats/comments/1rzuud4/the_level_of_disrespect_is_on/

This is NOT the reddit-viewer captions activated by the small "CC" button in the controls. If I activate those, I get double captions, as you can see in the attached screenshot below.

The smaller set of captions are controlled by the CC button. I am asking about the larger set of captions. Auto-captioning is turned off in Systems Settings/Accessibility/Hearing. I can see no setting in Safari that would be responsible for these.

As you can see, they're huge, which is an additional problem, but the simple truth is that I don't want them at all, but can't figure out where they are coming from or how to disable them. Help, please!

Mac mini, macOS 15.7

Posted on Mar 21, 2026 12:46 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

6x6

Level 6

19,905 points

Mar 21, 2026 5:18 PM in response to Ron Moskovitz

Sorry, I hadn't caught that you had already check the Accessibility settings.

I confirm what you observe: Safari shows those large subtitles but Firefox, for instance, does not.

I found a solution in this discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddithelp/comments/1rkojur/why_are_there_subtitles_on_every_video_i_play_and/. The trick is to right-click the video (from the Reddit feed), choose Open Video in New Tab, click the ">>" icon (bottom right), click Subtitles and choose Off. I tested it on other Reddit videos that showed large subtitles and the subtitles were gone. The Off setting seems to be Safari-wide.

Reply