By Supratik Lahiri, Product Manager, and Jeffrey Wieland, Director of Accessibility
Making Facebook accessible to everyone is a key part of building global community. Today we’re allowing publishers to include closed captions in Facebook Live, helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience live videos. Now, 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, we hope 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.
For more information on adding closed captions to Facebook Live broadcasts, click here. For more information on Facebook’s accessibility features and settings, click here, and follow news and updates from the Facebook Accessibility team here.