Twitter has taken a hot minute with this, possibly thanks to its whole CEO shakeup thing, but it’s finally rolling out a key feature towards accessibility: closed captions for videos. Twitter announced via its Support page that, as of yesterday, captions now show up automatically on any (new) video posted.
Expanding Twitter’s toolkit
Captions are available across the board for Twitter users, on iOS, Android and on the web client. On mobile, captions will pop up immediately if you have your volume all the way down, though you can set them up to stick around via your phone’s accessibility settings even if you raise your volume. On the web you’ll need to click the “CC” button to toggle them on and off.
If you want to check a full list of auto-generated caption options, head this way. Twitter points out that captions will be generated in the language of the device used to upload the video originally.
Twitter’s a little late to the automatic captioning party. Zoom, Chrome and Clubhouse all updated their accessibility offerings to include the feature earlier this year. Even Xbox threw its hat into the ring. To Twitter’s credit, it did add closed captions to voice tweets a few months ago already.
There’s one caveat though. The Verge points out that closed captions will only appear on videos posted from here on out. Any videos posted before now remain captionless. Translation isn’t available yet either. There’s also no way to report inaccurate captions just yet, so expect some QA issues for the moment.