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Twitter Rolls Out Closed Caption Toggle On Mobile Apps

Twitter Rolls Out Closed Caption Toggle On Mobile Apps

By Sumit Adhikari
June 24, 2022

Twitter is widely rolling out the closed caption toggle on mobile. The company Thursday announced that the feature is now available for everyone on Android and iOS mobile apps. It first started testing closed captions on iOS a couple of months back.

If a video posted on Twitter has closed captions, you will see a “CC” button in the top-right corner of it. You can tap the button to turn subtitles on/off anytime. When enabled, you will see text transcriptions of whatever is said in the video.

Closed captions make Twitter more accessible to everyone, particularly those with hearing difficulties. It also comes in handy at times when you can’t properly understand the speaker’s accent in a video. Another use case is when you want to watch a video without raising the volume level, and you don’t have a pair of headphones handy. Twitter is now making it easier to access this feature on mobile apps.

This isn’t an entirely new feature on Twitter, though. The social network already offers the closed caption toggle on the web. But, on mobile apps, whether the written descriptions show up or not depended on several factors. Firstly, you have to enable the feature from the accessibility settings. Additionally, subtitles only appear when the sound is turned off. If you expand the video to full screen, which enables sound, subtitles automatically disappear. With the new button, enabling captions on supported Twitter videos is a lot simpler.

In December, Twitter introduced automatically generated captions for videos. The feature is self-explanatory. It automatically generates subtitles for new videos on the platform, even if the publisher hasn’t attached a captions file to it. Automated captions are available on iOS, Android, and the web and support “most languages,” though there are certain limitations. A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that the new closed captions toggle is not related to it.

Twitter continues to improve amid a high-profile privatization process

The latest accessibility feature on Twitter mobile apps comes at a time when the social network giant prepares for high-profile privatization. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has inked a deal to buy the company for $44 billion. The deal has yet to complete as there are several hurdles on the way, such as shareholder approval. But the Twitter board recently unanimously recommended that shareholders approve the sale.

There remain concerns about the proportion of fake accounts and debt financing. But those could be resolved soon too. We will keep you posted about this high-profile privatization of Twitter.