Twitter announced that it is rolling out a button to toggle captions for its video player on its iOS and Android applications. If a video has captions available, the button will be visible on the top-right corner of the video and will let users choose whether they want to see captions for the video or not quickly. Twitter was reportedly testing the feature in April, but at the time, it was only available to a limited number of iOS users.
Until now, closed captions showed up on Twitter videos on your mobile phone depending on many factors including whether you have turned it on in your phone’s accessibility settings and whether you are watching a video with your sound off. While that is still the case, you can now easily turn captions on and off when you want, similar to how the implementation works on the Twitter website.
In an email interaction with The Verge, Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo said that the button will only show up on videos with captions already available and is not related to the automated caption system.
Video captions or no captions, it’s now easier to choose for some of you on iOS, and soon on Android.
On videos that have captions available, we’re testing the option to turn captions off/on with a new “CC” button. pic.twitter.com/Q2Q2Wmr78U
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 22, 2022
In other news, Twitter confirmed earlier this week that it is working on a built-in ‘Notes’ feature that will allow users to write long-form text on the platform instead of having to link to an article or blog that they have written externally. Currently, tweets are limited to 280 characters. The Notes feature is currently under testing and is only available in certain regions like the United States, Ghana and Canada.
Notes will be a separate section in the app where Twitter users will be able to write out their long-form content into a ‘Write’ tab. This longer piece can then be embedded into a tweet later on to publish it. Twitter also mentioned that a group of writers has been helping the platform test the feature by publishing Notes with other tweets, images and videos embedded into them.
