YouTube wants to be more accessible to all kinds of viewers (and listeners) and so they are rolling out and will soon roll out some new audio and accessibility features. This includes enabling live auto-captions for your livestreams and auto-translation for captions in supported languages. They’re also testing out the ability to add multi-audio tracts and descriptive audio feeds for those who may have vision issues. Soon you will also be able to give channel permission to “subtitle editor” on your YouTube channel.
Previously, only YouTube channels that have more than 1,000 subscribers are able to enable auto captions for their live streams. Now creators will be able to enable the live audio captions for English streams regardless of how many subscribers you may have. While this is only available for English for now, they are planning to expand this to 13 supported languages which include Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.
Later this year, YouTube will also be rolling out auto-translation for captions for Android and iOS devices. Currently, this is only available in the desktop version but soon for mobile devices as well but only for supported languages mentioned above. Also later this year, they’ll be testing out a way to search caption transits on mobile so you can find specific keywords mentioned in the video and maybe jump directly to that part.
They’re now testing out with some creators the ability to add multiple audio tracks to be able to bring multi-language audio for international audiences. This also includes descriptive audio for those who may be blind or have low vision. They’re looking at rolling this out widely to more users in the next few quarters. Features like this can make YouTube a more accessible and inclusive platform.
Lastly, a new Channel Permission in YouTube Studio will allow creators to assign “Subtitle Editor” to someone else on their channel. They’re still working on it though and it’s taking longer than expected. YouTube will bring an update about this in the coming months.
