Last week, social media giant, Twitter announced new features to enhance user experience and expand its appeal to different categories of users. These include the closed caption toggle, easing Space launch, and the long-form experiment to expand writing on Twitter beyond the current 280 characters.
Twitter is rolling out its closed caption toggle to all users on iOS and Android, which makes videos more accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Auto captions are available on the web, iOS, and Android in more than 30 languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Hindi, and more.
The CC button will appear in the top-right corner of a video that has captions available. You can then tap the button to turn captions on or off.
Twitter Space hosting becomes easier
In the week, Twitter also announced that it wants to make it easier for users to start a Space and is launching two experiments on iOS. The first experiment will allow iOS users to start a Space from the tweet composer.
To do so, you can tap on the Spaces icon in the tweet composer to start a new space. The second experiment will let iOS users start a space from the retweet menu. When you start a Space from the retweet menu, it will skip the usual setup and immediately go live. The tweet will then automatically be pinned at the top of the Space.
In addition, Twitter also announced that it’s testing a new way for hosts and speakers to share tweets in a Space via the retweet menu.
Long-form writing on Twitter
Aside from the above features, Twitter also last week said it has started testing “Notes,” a way to write and publish long-form content on the social media platform. A small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana, and the United Kingdom now have access to Notes as part of the initial testing phase.
Twitter says Notes can be read on and off Twitter by people in most countries. Users who are part of the testing phase will get access to a new “Write” tab, which is where they can write and access all of their Notes. These users will also have a new “Notes” tab in their profile that holds their published work to make it easy for their followers to find their long-form content.
