The company said captions will improve accessibility. The feature will be available in multiple languages including English and Hindi
Twitter launched Voice Tweets in June 2020
Twitter on July 15 announced that it will now provide rolling captions for voice tweets. The move comes after the micro-blogging site was criticised for failing to make voice tweets accessible to its special needs users. The feature was launched in June last year.
Acknowledging the same, Twitter said captions for voice tweets comes after it “took the feedback to improve accessibility features”.
“We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today. Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on the web, click the “CC” button,” (sic) it said.
We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today.
Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on web, click the “CC” button. https://t.co/hrdI19Itu6 pic.twitter.com/pDlpOUgV6l
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2021
The captions will be automatically generated and are supported in multiple languages such as English, Hindi, Arabic, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish, the Verge reported.
The feature will use the users’ device language settings to base its transcriptions and will not work accurately if the device is set to one language and you are speaking in another.
The captions can be viewed by tapping the ‘CC’ icon on the top-right of the voice tweet and will only appear for new voice tweets, the report added.
Twitter had in September 2020 allocated a dedicated team to focus on accessibility after it came to light that employees had to volunteer their own time for these issues. In a statement, Twitter’s head of global accessibility Gurpreet Kaur said this was “part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible”.
