More than a year ago, the social network Twitter activated support for voice posts and received a lot of criticism for the lack of features that provide access to audio information for people with disabilities. Finally, the company launched a new feature – when you press the “CC” button, the audio recording is accompanied by automatically generated subtitles. But they are not yet available to everyone.
Firstly, while the function is only available for iOS users, and secondly, only English, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean and Italian are supported. The reason for this choice of developers is unknown – for example, South Korea has a relatively small population globally, while the very popular Spanish language is not represented.
We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today.
Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on web, click the “CC” button. https://t.co/hrdI19Itu6 pic.twitter.com/pDlpOUgV6l
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2021
According to Twitter representatives, subtitles will only be available for newly created tweets – they are generated literally at the time of creation. When voice posts were first tested last June, critics immediately noted that subtitles should be present. According to rumors, with the United States, this is required by federal law. Then the social network admitted that there was no special team for the development and implementation of the function, and the existing employees, as far as possible, devote their own time to the development of technology.
Since then, the company has created a number of teams to ensure the availability of information. Initially, they promised to add automated subtitles at the beginning of the year, but they did not manage to release the function on time.
In the future, Twitter has promised to improve and expand related services to create a “truly inclusive” service.