Closed captions support in Twitter videos

[infraxx]

Is there a support of closed captions attached to the video? If yes should it be embedded into MP4 file or can be uploaded in a separate file (SRT, TTML, SCC, etc)?

[andypiper]

I’m not aware of any support for this technology at this time.

[barndawgie]

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t support Closed Captions or Subtitles today; you can include them in your uploaded video but they will not get passed through to the client.

[nicola]

Hi

Are subtitles allowed on Twitter videos now, as @Number10gov show videos on Twitter with subtitles: https://twitter.com/Number10gov/status/733726168134737921

How can I do this too? It would be for a government account, rather than for personal or commercial videos

Thanks, N

[andypiper]

As mentioned above, the video would have to include the subtitles directly as overlays, Twitter does not have any API support or display support for showing them as separate feeds.

[nicola]

Hi Andy

I didn’t see the comment about the overlays, thanks for replying, anyway. I look forward to the subtitles API on Twitter at some point .

[MarkSweeney]

Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and others need a Closed Caption api. More, and longer videos are being posted to Twitter than ever. Video content needs to be accessible.

WebVTT supports all browsers, and works on iOS/macOS, Android and Windows.
.srt is nearly universal as well, and it’s what Facebook and Youtube uses.

18% of people have some hearing impairment, and that number is expected to rise.

That’s nearly 1 in 5 twitter uses that will need closed captions to understand what is being said.

Closed captions also help in noisy environments where it’s impossible to isolate the audio from background noise.

It’s time to add a closed caption api and stop excluding deaf and HoH from twitter videos.

[andypiper]

Thank you for this feedback. I don’t have visibility into this on the roadmap right now, but I’ll definitely make sure the relevant teams are aware of the desire to make videos more accessible on Twitter.

[declancabra]

Twitter needs to take this seriously, I am managing Twitter for a disability group and need to be able to include the deaf community. Someone should take an ADA case.

[andypiper]

Thank you. I can tell you that we do take this seriously, but this is not as turnkey simple for us to implement as it may outwardly seem (regardless of other platforms).

Unfortunately we cannot provide support or take feedback for our consumer apps or website on these API-focused forums.

We recently published an API Platform roadmap -> https://trello.com/b/myf7rKwV/twitter-api-platform-roadmap

We are not in a position to do the same for our consumer apps. We hear all of your feedback and understand your concerns and frustrations. We cannot cover many of these kinds of questions in our developer forums as we focus here on API and platform issues. Thank you.

[andypiper]