Users of the Twitter app for Android and iOS will soon have access to a button that will enable them to turn closed captions on and off at their discretion.
Twitter has announced that it will soon be adding a button to its iOS and Android applications that will allow users to enable subtitles for their video player. When there are captions available for a video, a button will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the video. This button will provide users the ability to choose very fast whether or not they wish to view the captions for the video. There were rumours that Twitter was conducting tests of the functionality in April, but at the time, it was only accessible to a select group of iOS users.
Up until now, the closed captions that appeared on Twitter videos on your mobile phone were dependent on a variety of factors. Two of these factors were whether or not you had activated the feature in the accessibility settings of your phone and whether or not you were watching a video with the sound turned off. Despite the fact that this is still the case, you now have the ability to switch captions on and off at your discretion, very similarly to how the functionality is implemented on the Twitter website.
In an email exchange with The Verge, a spokesman for Twitter named Shaokyi Amdo stated that the button will only appear on videos that already have captions accessible, and that it has nothing to do with Twitter’s automatic captioning system.
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 directly on the platform rather than having to link to an article or blog that they have written externally. This development comes as a response to user demand for the ability to write longer posts without having to link to an external article or blog. The maximum number of characters that may be used in a tweet is 280 at the moment. At this time, the Notes function is only accessible in certain countries and territories, including the United States, Ghana, and Canada, as it is being evaluated.
Notes will be a distinct part within the app that users of Twitter will be able to access in order to compose their lengthy material and then save it under the ‘Write’ tab. This extended essay can then be published by embedding it into a tweet at a later time. Twitter also claimed that a group of authors has been assisting the site in testing the new feature by writing Notes that have additional tweets, photographs, and videos embedded inside them.