Twitter Adds Captions To Voice Tweets Over A Year After Launch

Twitter now deploys subtitles for voice tweets, the company announced on Thursday. Twitter first launched voice tweets in June 2020, but they were quickly criticized at the time by accessibility advocates for not having captions.

Now when you create a voice tweet (which you can only do on the iOS app at the moment), the subtitles will be automatically generated in the supported languages, namely English, Japanese, l ‘Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean and Italian.

To view the captions of a tweet, you can click or tap the CC icon in the upper right corner of the voice tweet window. Captions only appear on new voice tweets, according to Twitter The edge, so you won’t see them on the older ones.

Below is a screenshot of how the captions and CC icon will look on the web, taken from a voice tweet I created while writing this article:

You can also try to listen my voice tweet here and follow the captions, although I warn you that my tweets will eventually be deleted automatically. If you read this article shortly after it was published, the voice tweet may have disappeared.

When the voice tweets were launched, it also emerged that there was no dedicated accessibility team on Twitter at the time. The company has since corrected this, announcing that it has formed teams focus on accessibility in September.

“As part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible to everyone, we are deploying automated captions for voice Tweets on iOS,” Twitter global accessibility manager Gurpreet Kaur said in a statement. “While it’s still early days and we know it won’t be perfect early on, this is one of the many steps we are taking to expand and strengthen accessibility through our service, and we look forward to continuing our journey to create a truly inclusive service. “

Twitter also offers subtitles in Twitter Spaces, its Clubhouse-style social audio rooms.