Twitter brings closed captioning toggle to Android and iOS

By Anita George Published June 24, 2022

Twitter now offers the option to turn closed captioning on or off in its mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.

On Thursday evening, the bird app’s official @TwitterSupport account announced via a tweet that a closed captioning toggle is now available to everyone using Twitter for Android or iOS. The tweeted announcement described the new mobile app feature as a “‘CC’ button” that works with videos with captions enabled.

Recommended Videos

The choice is now yours: the closed caption toggle is now available for everyone on iOS and Android!

Tap the “CC” button on videos with available captions to turn the captions off/on. https://t.co/GceKv68wvi

— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022

In the replies to the tweeted announcement, @TwitterSupport offered a few more details about the feature that’s new to the Twitter mobile app:

The closed captioning toggle is “already available” for Twitter on the web and it should show up as users hover over a video that has captions enabled.

This is already available for everyone on web! On videos that have captions available, you can turn the captions off/on by clicking the “CC” button at the bottom that appears when you hover over the video.

— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022

You also don’t have to tap the toggle button every time you want to enable captions for videos. Once you toggle captions on for one video, the other videos in your timeline that offer captions should also follow suit.

You're welcome, Courtney! When you use the “CC” button to turn on captions for one video, captions will stay on for other videos in your timeline that have captions available.

— Support (@Support) June 23, 2022

We tested the new mobile-friendly closed captioning toggle feature on Twitter for Android, and currently it is live and working. But here are a couple of things we noticed:

As @TwitterSupport noted in their announcement, the new toggle feature only shows up for videos that have closed captions enabled. And depending on who you follow, you may not have that many videos in your timeline that are eligible to display the toggle. It was hard to find a video that had captions enabled (so that the toggle would appear).
Based on what we’ve seen so far on Android, the closed captioning feature and its toggle do not seem to be visible in videos embedded in tweets while in the timeline. You’ll have to click on the tweet itself (not the video) to open the tweet, in order to see the closed captions and the toggle button (which should then appear in the top-right corner of the video).

Topics

Computing Writer

Anita George has been writing for Digital Trends' Computing section since 2018. So for almost six years, Anita has written…

Social Media

Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities

The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Social Media

Twitter reportedly plans to enable Edit Tweet for everyone this week

A person's hands holding a smartphone as they browse Twitter on it.

Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, it's not always clear if the social media app is moving in the right direction, but things do appear to be moving swiftly nonetheless. At least that's how it would seem if the latest report about Twitter's Edit Tweet feature proves to be true.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Twitter apparently has plans to roll out its Edit Tweet feature to all users on Twitter (for free) as early as this week. The Edit Tweet feature allows users to edit a tweet after it has already been published.

Social Media

Twitter Blue is losing Ad Free Articles and Musk’s latest tweets indicate further changes

Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

Twitter has reportedly ended its ad-free articles perk that it offered to Twitter Blue subscribers.

On Tuesday, 9to5Mac reported that Twitter has terminated a Twitter Blue feature known as "Ad-Free Articles." The feature allowed Twitter Blue subscribers to read articles without ads from participating publishers. The cancellation of Ad-Free Articles was apparently announced via an email sent to those publishers.