Twitter’s caption switch is now available on iOS and Android

Twitter has announced that a button to toggle subtitles for its video player is now available to everyone on iOS and Android. The button, which appears in the top right corner of the video when captions are available, lets you choose whether you want to see written descriptions. Twitter started testing this feature in April, but it was only available to a limited number of iPhone users.

For yearsWhether or not captions are displayed on your mobile device is determined by several factors, such as whether you have closed captioning turned on in your phone’s accessibility settings, or if you’re watching the video with your sound off. While that’s still taken into account, you can now easily toggle them on or off whenever you want, just like you’ve already been able to do on the website of Twitter and many other video platforms.

If you want to see a preview of the toggle, you can check out The edge‘s tweet featuring a trailer for our Netflix show, with a subtitle file attached. Staff here could see the switch on both iPhones and Android phones, although it could be a bit glitchy – sometimes subtitles just wouldn’t show up and pressing the button every now and then froze the video.

In an email to The edgeTwitter spokesman Shaokyi Amdo said the button “only appears on videos with captions already available, and is not related to the automated captioning system.” Hopefully, the switch that is available to everyone will encourage anyone who uploads a video to Twitter to consider adding captions.