- Kyle Chua
YouTube Adding Auto-Translation For Captions On Mobile This Year
YouTube, in a support thread, outlined a host of new accessibility updates that are coming to the platform this year.
One of the most notable updates is the addition of auto-translation for captions on mobile, making it easier for international viewers to understand what they are watching. This is rolling out later this year on Android and iOS. Currently, the feature is only available in the desktop version of YouTube.
The popular video-sharing platform also announced that it’s testing, with a small group of creators, the ability to add multiple audio tracks to videos to help provide multi-language audio. Additionally, YouTube is adding descriptive audio for people who are blind or have low vision. In case you’re unfamiliar, descriptive audio is audio content that narrates the visual information of a video. YouTube plans to roll these features out in the coming quarters.
Creators can also now enable live automatic captions for any live streams in English. This feature was previously only available to channels with more than a thousand subscribers, but now it’s available to everyone.
YouTube said it plans to expand this feature to all 13 supported automatic captioning languages in the coming months. The supported languages include Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.
Lastly, the platform shared updates on the previously announced option to let creators and people they trust edit subtitles of videos. It added that it’s actively working on the feature and will share more updates in the coming months. YouTube also noted that it's experimenting with the option to search transcripts on mobile later this year.
"Improving accessibility is a top priority for YouTube, and we hope these updates will help creators reach a wider audience," YouTube wrote.
Written by Kyle Chua
#YouTube #YouTubeAccessibility #YouTubeCloseCaption #YouTubeSupportedLanguages #YouTubeUpdates #YouTubeSubtitleEditor #YouTubeMultiAudio #YouTubeVideos #YouTubeCreators #YouTubeAuoTranslation #YouTubeNewFeatures #YouTubeInternational