When you come across a video on your Twitter feed, you may notice that captions are automatically on when the audio is muted, then disappear when you click on it and the volume is unmuted. Thankfully, Twitter is fixing that issue, as it has announced that it is testing a closed captioning (CC) button for videos.
The social media company’s support team said that the CC button is already available for some iOS users, and that it will come to Android soon. It’s testing the new feature for videos that already have captions available in the first place, giving users the option to turn them off or on. In the demonstration GIF below, the CC button appears on the top-right corner of the video when you pause it, cueing you to toggle it if you so choose.
Video captions or no captions, it’s now easier to choose for some of you on iOS, and soon on Android.
On videos that have captions available, we’re testing the option to turn captions off/on with a new “CC” button. pic.twitter.com/Q2Q2Wmr78U
— Support (@Support) April 22, 2022
In December 2021, Twitter added automatic captions to videos, which show only when people adjust accessibility settings on their phones. Although they allowed more people to engage with video content uploaded on Twitter, it didn’t help that the captions shut off when users unmute the audio. Putting in the CC button gives everyone, especially the hearing impaired, the ability to better understand everything that’s happening in the videos uploaded on the platform.
Twitter’s latest accessibility feature test comes two weeks after it rolled out alt-text badges and exposed image descriptions globally for the benefit of visually impaired users. The global rollout of those features resulted from a month of bug fixes and feedback from a select group of users.
Meanwhile, the social media giant is adding the long-awaited edit button, which it will test on Twitter Blue subscribers in the coming months. On top of giving users the ability to fix their grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in their tweets after they’re posted, it’s also working on another new feature code-named “Vibe,” which will allow them to set their status à la AIM and Facebook.
