Twitter now offers the option to turn closed captioning on or off in its mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.
On Thursday evening, the bird app’s official @TwitterSupport account announced via a tweet that a closed captioning toggle is now available to everyone using Twitter for Android or iOS. The tweeted announcement described the new mobile app feature as a “‘CC’ button” that works with videos with captions enabled.
The choice is now yours: the closed caption toggle is now available for everyone on iOS and Android!
Tap the “CC” button on videos with available captions to turn the captions off/on. https://t.co/GceKv68wvi
— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022
In the replies to the tweeted announcement, @TwitterSupport offered a few more details about the feature that’s new to the Twitter mobile app:
The closed captioning toggle is “already available” for Twitter on the web and it should show up as users hover over a video that has captions enabled.
This is already available for everyone on web! On videos that have captions available, you can turn the captions off/on by clicking the “CC” button at the bottom that appears when you hover over the video.
— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022
You also don’t have to tap the toggle button every time you want to enable captions for videos. Once you toggle captions on for one video, the other videos in your timeline that offer captions should also follow suit.
You're welcome, Courtney! When you use the “CC” button to turn on captions for one video, captions will stay on for other videos in your timeline that have captions available.
— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022
We tested the new mobile-friendly closed captioning toggle feature on Twitter for Android, and currently it is live and working. But here are a couple of things we noticed:
- As @TwitterSupport noted in their announcement, the new toggle feature only shows up for videos that have closed captions enabled. And depending on who you follow, you may not have that many videos in your timeline that are eligible to display the toggle. It was hard to find a video that had captions enabled (so that the toggle would appear).
- Based on what we’ve seen so far on Android, the closed captioning feature and its toggle do not seem to be visible in videos embedded in tweets while in the timeline. You’ll have to click on the tweet itself (not the video) to open the tweet, in order to see the closed captions and the toggle button (which should then appear in the top-right corner of the video).
