YouTube Becomes More Accessible

The platform plans to bring new features — auto-captions, multiple audios, and extended Studio functionality — to make it more appealing for foreigners, as well as viewers with impaired vision.

For starters, automatic captions for English live streams will become a reality. In the past, only those channels that racked up 1,000+ subscribers could employ the know-how. Now, it’s available for everyone to deliver a better audience engagement.

The feature will be available for 13 languages allowed for automatic captioning by YouTube: Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Subtitles aren’t the only innovation, though. Multiple voice tracks will also be a thing, so creators can add a voice-over with a foreign language translation. The feature comes in handy for those channels that gain traction overseas.

Descriptive audio is also one of the anticipated options. It will help people with poor vision to better understand what’s happening on the screen.

Odds are, YouTube Studio will see some changes as well. In the workshop, there’s a feature, which will allow the trusted caption authors to add captions autonomously. Dubbed “Subtitle Editor”, it will bring more delegating opportunities for the content creators.

At the moment, some of these features are available for a select group of YT creators. Viewers, who prefer watching stuff on their phones, will also get access to the automatically generated subtitles in their native language.

While the automatic caption is pretty useful, a good portion of the foreign viewers watches the English content for the sake of watching it. And what new features do you think YouTube could also use? Share your opinion!