Twitter adds captions to voice tweets

Twitter is going to roll out captions 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, reports The Verge.

Now, when users make a voice tweet (something you can only do on the iOS app right now), captions will be automatically generated in supported languages, which are English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian.

To see the captions on a tweet, users can click or tap the CC icon in the top-right corner of the voice tweet window.

Captions only appear on new voice tweets, Twitter tells The Verge, so users won’t see them on older ones.

When voice tweets launched, it also came to light that there wasn’t a dedicated team at Twitter for accessibility at the time — instead, employees had to volunteer their own time for accessibility work, reads the report.

The company has since fixed that, announcing that it had formed teams to focus on accessibility in September.

“As part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible for everyone, we’re rolling out automated captions for Voice Tweets to iOS,” Twitter’s head of global accessibility Gurpreet Kaur said in a statement.

“Though it’s still early and we know it won’t be perfect at first, it’s one of many steps we’re taking to expand and strengthen accessibility across our service, and we look forward to continuing our journey to create a truly inclusive service.”

Twitter also offers captions in Twitter Spaces, its Clubhouse-like social audio rooms.