It’s more than a year since Twitter launched voice tweets, offering users the option of tweeting a spoken message of up to 140 seconds in length. The company has now addressed accessibility concerns by offering captions for voice tweets …
Background
Twitter initially offered voice tweets to a limited number of iOS users, before a wider rollout later in the year.
The company said at the time that voice was intended to offer “a more human touch” to tweets.
Accessibility campaigners were quick to point out that the company was failing to offer captions for those who are deaf or have hearing impairments. Twitter apologized, and promised to add a transcription feature.
Twitter is where you go to talk about what’s happening. Over the years, photos, videos, gifs, and extra characters have allowed you to add your own flair and personality to your conversations. But sometimes 280 characters aren’t enough and some conversational nuances are lost in translation. So starting today, we’re testing a new feature that will add a more human touch to the way we use Twitter – your very own voice.
Incredibly, it turned out that Twitter didn’t even have an accessibility team, something the company also promised to rectify.
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 – creating a dedicated team to focus on greater accessibility, tooling, and advocacy across all of our products.
Captions for voice tweets
The feature has finally landed.
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.
