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YouTube has announced that its live streaming automatic captions should now be available to all creators, instead of being limited to channels with over 1,000 subscribers as they were when the feature was initially rolled out. This change, along with some future improvements the company details in its blog, should help make the platform more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Some of these updates include the provision of automatic live subtitles in 12 additional languages instead of English (including Japanese, Turkish and Spanish), the ability to add multiple audio tracks to a video to support multiple languages (and audio descriptions for viewing) and the extension of the automatic subtitle translation feature to also support mobile devices. Extended language support for live and machine-translated captions will arrive in the coming months, and YouTube says several audio tracks will be more widely available “in the coming quarters.”
YouTube also says it will “experiment” by allowing users to search for video transcripts on mobile devices. For me this has been an extremely useful feature on the desktop – click on the three dots icon to the right of the Like / Dislike bar, then click on “Open transcript” for full text of searchable video saved me countless hours, so it’s nice to see that could happen on mobile as well.
Finally, YouTube says it’s still working on clearing the caption editor and will provide updates on its progress “in the coming months.” The feature, which will allow creators to designate other people to add captions to their videos, was intended to replace the community captions feature that YouTube removed. Without being able to rely on volunteers for subtitles and translations, creators who wanted to make their videos more accessible had to scramble to create their own systems.
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