YouTube, in a significant development for millions of deaf Internet users, extended automatic caption capability on March 4 to all English-language videos on the video-sharing website. YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos since 2008 and in November of last year the site began offering machine-generated captions for about a dozen partner channels.
Hiroto Tokusei, a YouTube product manager, said in a blog post on Thursday that the automatic caption, or auto-caption, feature was now being expanded to all videos on the site in English. Auto captioning uses speech-to-text technology to generate subtitles. The auto-captioning feature will make YouTube videos "more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages," the YouTube project manager said.