Twitter has announced that it will add text captions to spoken tweets, in response to previous criticism of the accessibility of the platform's audio feature.
Twitter adds captions to spoken tweets
Originally launched in June of last year, voice tweets were initially only available to a small number of users on the platform during testing. In a blog post announcing the new audio feature at the time, product designer Maya Patterson and senior software engineer Remy Bourgoin wrote, “There’s a lot that can go unsaid or uninterpreted using text, so we hope voice tweets create a more human experience for both listeners and storytellers.”
However, the audio feature quickly came under fire, with users asking the company to address accessibility issues for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and therefore cannot take advantage of the feature.
After the company announced last September that it would expand voice tweeting to more users on Twitter, it announced in a blog post that it had also created two new teams to address accessibility going forward.
