You won’t have to skip past videos on Twitter simply because you forgot your earbuds for much longer — the service is working on adding automated captions for audio and video posts to improve accessibility.
In an announcement on its blog, Twitter revealed the feature is slated to make its way to the app by early 2021. The move is part of the company’s effort to make the platform more accessible for people with disabilities.
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“We’ve partnered with external groups and over the coming months we’ll be gathering feedback from people with disabilities via interviews, surveys, and doing remote usability studies of new prototypes,” said VP of People Experience Dalana Brand and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour.
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The new feature is an extension of voice tweets, which Twitter first introduced a few months back in June. That said, while voice tweets were accessible by everyone on the platform, the company only allowed a small group of iOS users to create them.
In fact, it was voice tweets that encouraged Twitter to follow through with captions. “Testing voice tweets earlier this summer made us realize how much work we still need to do as a company, and we made a commitment to make Twitter more inclusive for the disabled community,” Brand and Beykpour added.
To spur the initiative, Twitter is also opening up two new divisions: the Accessibility Center of Excellence, which will focus more on setting goals and advancing the cause, and the Experience Accessibility Team, which will be responsible for developing new features and sharpening already existing ones.
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