Twitter Removes Captions From Twitter Spaces…. Dealing A Blow To Hearing Impaired Users

If you’re hearing impaired, and you’re a Twitter user, you’re not going to be using the Spaces feature on Twitter. According to The Verge, the caption feature that used to be part of Spaces is broken on multiple platforms:

Twitter Spaces, the company’s social audio rooms, no longer lets you use captions if you’re listening on iOS. Twitter still advertises that you can turn on captions through the three-dot menu in a Space, but on iOS, that option currently isn’t there.

On other platforms, it seems like captions should work but don’t. When listening to a Space on the web, captions don’t show, and while the “CC” closed captions button is present, clicking it on or off doesn’t change anything. On Android, the option to turn on captions is there, but it didn’t work for one Verge staffer.

While this could be a bug that could yet be fixed. Captions apparently haven’t worked for a while on Twitter Spaces. That implies that Elon Musk’s extreme cost cutting has resulted in the people behind this feature being downsized. Which means that there’s nobody left to fix whatever is wrong with this feature. There’s also the possibility that Elon and his incredibly short sighted mentality has simply yanked this feature. The thing is either is plausible. And either way, if you’re hearing impaired, it’s a big reason not to use Twitter as clearly that community doesn’t matter to Elon.

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