Since making Facebook accessible to everyone is a key part of the global community, the social media giant has announced that it is now allowing publishers to include closed captions in Facebook Live, helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience live videos.
What this means is that if your captioning settings are turned on, you’ll automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts when they’re available.
Over the past year, daily watch time for Facebook Live broadcasts has grown by more than 4x, and 1 in 5 Facebook videos is a Live broadcast. By enabling publishers to include closed captions with their Live broadcasts, the company said it hopes that more people can now participate in the exciting moments that unfold on Live.
“Today’s milestone represents the next step in our efforts to make content on Facebook accessible to more people. 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,” Facebook stated.