AFP PHOTO / LOIC VENANCE
Facebook has started allowing publishers to use “closed captions” in Facebook Live to make the feature more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
“Now, if your captioning settings are turned on, you’ll automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts when they’re available,” Facebook said in a statement.
“By enabling publishers to include closed captions with their Live broadcasts, we hope more people can now participate in the exciting moments that unfold on Live,” it said, after mentioning that the daily watch time for Facebook Live broadcasts has grown by more than 4x in the past year.
“Today’s milestone represents the next step in our efforts to make content on Facebook accessible to more people,” Facebook said. “It’s already possible to add captions to non-live videos when uploading them to Facebook Pages, and publishers can use our speech recognition service to automatically generate captions for videos on their Pages.” KS