Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In a major boon for accessibility, Twitter is now rolling out automatic captions for videos, the company announced Tuesday. Auto captions will be available globally on iOS, Android, and the web in “most languages,” according to Twitter.
However, there’s one significant catch with the automatic captions: they’ll only appear on new videos uploaded to Twitter. Old videos that don’t have captions still won’t have them. There’s also no way to report inaccurate or bad captions, a Twitter spokesperson tells The Verge, though they say “we’re always looking at ways to improve our accessibility features.”
Twitter has a somewhat rocky history with accessibility features, though it has taken steps to improve. The company was heavily criticized for launching voice tweets in 2020 without captions, and it came to light soon after that Twitter didn’t have a dedicated accessibility team at the time. Twitter has since created two teams focused on accessibility, and it did eventually add captions to voice tweets, though more than a year after they first launched. Twitter has also added live captions to Spaces, its Clubhouse-like audio room product.