Twitter is finally offering captioning for voice tweets after a year of complaints

San Francisco, California - After a year of accessibility advocates around the world urging Twitter to introduce the feature, voice tweets will now finally have captioning.

Voice Tweets will now come with automatic captioning, with the potential for users to upload their own captioning files in the future.
Voice Tweets will now come with automatic captioning, with the potential for users to upload their own captioning files in the future.  © collage: 123RF/ rvlsoft & 123RF/ simmmax & 123RF/ breathofriver

The 140-second voice recordings were initially touted by the platform as the perfect "human touch" to tweets, but choosing to offer the feature without closed captioning was discouraging for users with hearing impairments.

The lack of captioning effectively prevented people from participating in important conversations. For visually impaired and deaf individuals, a second app, or even an entirely different device was necessary to translate tweets to the spoken word or voice tweets to text.

Not all phones are capable of running multiple apps to go through these processes at the same time, so offering in-app services definitely makes for a positive experience for everyone.

9To5Mac reported that Twitter made promises to eventually offer a transcription feature by "early 2021". To even get to that point however, the company had to first put together a team to address this and other issues faced by differently abled users.

It's not clear why Twitter took so long to offer the feature, as automatic captioning isn't exactly a new science. Both YouTube and Facebook offer automatic captioning services on their videos and have for quite some time. Fortunately, it seems they have finally caught up.

And because computer generated captions aren't always accurate – perhaps due to an accent or background noise – the company is also looking into allowing users to upload their own caption files.

Cover photo: collage: 123RF/ rvlsoft & 123RF/ simmmax & 123RF/ breathofriver

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