YouTube has announced that automated livestream captions will now be available to all producers, rather of just those with more over 1,000 followers, as they were when the function was first introduced. This move, coupled with other upcoming enhancements detailed in the company's blog, should help make the platform more accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing users.

Some of these updates include the addition of live auto captions to 12 additional languages (including Japanese, Turkish, and Spanish), the ability to add multiple audio tracks to a video to support multiple languages (and audio descriptions for those with limited eyesight), and the expansion of the auto-translate captions feature to support mobile devices. The increased language support for live and auto-translate captions will be accessible in the next months, while multiple audio tracks will be more widely available "in the coming quarters," according to YouTube.

YouTube will also "experiment" with allowing viewers to search video transcripts on mobile devices. This has been a really handy tool for me on desktop - selecting the three dot symbol to the right of the like/dislike bar, then hitting "Open transcript" to obtain a complete searchable text of the video has saved me many hours, so it's great to see that it may be coming to mobile as well.

Finally, YouTube states that it is continuing working on the Subtitle Editor permission and would give updates "in the coming months." The tool, which allows producers to authorize others to add subtitles to their films, was intended to replace the community captions function, which YouTube discontinued. Creators who wanted to make their films more accessible had to scurry to build their own systems since they couldn't rely on volunteers for captions and translations.