YouTube has announced that automated Livestream captions will now be available to all producers, rather not just those with more than 1,000 followers, as they were when the service was first introduced. This move, coupled with other upcoming enhancements detailed in the company’s blog, should help make the platform more accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing users.
Some of these updates include the addition of live auto-captions to 12 additional languages (including Japanese, Turkish, and Spanish), the ability to add multiple audio tracks to a video to support multiple languages (and audio descriptions for those with limited eyesight), and the expansion of the auto-translate captions feature to support mobile devices. The extended language support for live and auto-translate captions will be accessible in the next months, while multiple audio tracks will be more widely available “in the coming quarters,” according to YouTube. AUTO-TRANSLATE CAPTIONS AND SEARCHABLE TRANSCRIPTS ARE OTHER FEATURES COMING FROM THE DESKTOP TO THE MOBILE.
YouTube also says that it’ll “experiment” with letting users search through video transcripts on mobile devices. For me, this has been an extremely useful feature on desktop — clicking the three-dot icon to the right of the like/dislike bar, then hitting “Open transcript” to get a full searchable text of the video has saved me countless hours, so it’s nice to see that it could be coming to mobile as well. YOUTUBE HAS YET TO RELEASE A REPLACEMENT FOR COMMUNITY CAPTIONS
Finally, YouTube states that it is continually working on the Subtitle Editor permission and would bring updates “in the coming months.” The tool, which allows producers to authorize others to add subtitles to their videos, was intended to replace the community captions option, which YouTube deleted. Creators who wanted to make their videos more accessible had to hustle to construct their own systems because they couldn’t rely on volunteers for captions and translations.
