Microblogging app, Twitter has on Thursday announced that it is rolling out captions for its voice tweets feature to enhance the tool. The app also said it will be discontinuing its disappearing image feature “Fleet”, which was launched a few months ago as part of some changes to improve the user’s experience. The company said “We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today. Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on web, click the “CC” button.”
Twitter’s head of global accessibility, Gurpreet Kaur noted that the captions are automated and only available on iOS devices, while Fleet would be discontinued on August 3.
“As part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible for everyone, we’re rolling out automated captions for Voice Tweets to iOS.Though it’s still early, and we know it won’t be perfect at first, it’s one of many steps we’re taking to expand and strengthen accessibility across our service, and we look forward to continuing our journey to create a truly inclusive service,” Kaur said.
Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product also commented on the development, saying “We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped."
"If we’re not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while – we’re not taking big enough chances," Brown added.
"We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter."
