All Twitter videos to now have automatic captions

Twitter has rolled out an automatic captions feature for all videos on the platform. This feature is going to make Twitter more accessible to most of its users and has been made available globally on both iOS and Android. And as Twitter added, it is available for most languages.

Twitter’s new auto caption support, however, is only available for new videos getting uploaded on the platform. Older videos that do not have captions will remain as they are. Also, there is no way to report inaccurate captions on the platform. However, a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that they are “always looking at ways to improve our accessibility features”, so perhaps this might be something they eventually add.

The auto captions feature is currently available in 37 languages, including English, Chinese, Arabic, German, and Hindi, and in the since there is no live translation, the captions are going to mirror the language if the device that was used to upload the video originally.

On Android and iOS, auto captions are going to appear on videos that are muted, however, on the web, users have the option to switch these off or on by tapping on the “CC” button.

Twitter has had a difficult history with accessibility features on the platform and it has taken some steps to improve that. The platform was criticised for launching voice tweets in 2020 without captions and that brought another problematic factor to light: Twitter did not have a dedicated accessibility team at that point in time.

Since, Twitter has put together two teams that are focused on accessibility and it also rolled out captions for its voice tweets, a year after they were launched. The platform has also added live captions to Spaces.

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