Record a screen demo, post it, and watch how people actually consume it. Someone scrolls past it on a phone with the sound off. Someone else opens it in a Slack thread at their desk, sound off. A third skims it embedded in a doc, also with no sound. The narration you spent time on never plays for most of them.
That's the gap Capnot's on-screen captions are meant to close.
The demo has to work without audio
If your recording only makes sense with narration, you've built it for the minority who turn the sound on. Louder narration won't reach someone watching in silence. Putting the key words on the screen itself does, because they show up no matter what. A caption that says "click Export here" does the job whether the viewer can hear you or not.
Capnot lets you drop a caption on screen while you record, so the instruction and the action happen together. The viewer reads "now we save to iCloud" at the exact moment your cursor lands on the button. No editing pass afterward, no separate subtitle file to sync.
Captions beat a wall of text under the video
The usual workaround is to write out the steps below the video. It works, sort of, but it splits the viewer's attention — they're reading in one place and watching in another, trying to keep the two in step. Captions keep everything in one frame. Eyes stay on the screen. The words move with the demo instead of sitting in a paragraph the viewer has to cross-reference.
A few things that make captions land
Keep each one short enough to read at a glance — if it's a full sentence, it's probably two captions. Show it slightly before the action so the viewer knows what to look for. And don't caption everything; narrate the obvious stuff with the visuals and save captions for the moments that would confuse someone watching in silence.
If you make screen recordings for a product, a course, or support docs, try recording your next one as if the sound will never play. It changes what you put on screen — and Capnot is built for exactly that kind of demo. For the full workflow, see how to record a silent screen demo, or the complete guide to Mac screen captions. Not sure whether to narrate at all? See silent demo vs voiceover demo.