A reminder that accessibility is for everyone

I recently tested out live captions, and found a perfect use case for it.

Years ago I had a colleague who was hard of hearing. Because I took notes in meetings he asked if he could read along to keep up with the conversation. I was happy to oblige.

I’ve been a captions guy for most of my adult life. When I’m watching a movie I’ll turn on captions. My wife has put up with it, and we’ve found we miss far less of the dialogue as a result. The only downside is on comedy, where you’ll read the punch line before hearing it.

Apple continues to push forward with great accessibility features, and live captions is one of them.

My favorite new use case is when watching a short form video. Many of them, thankfully, have captions embedded, but not all. Live captions creates a small widget over the screen that reads what is being said—even if my volume is turned down all the way.

I love it. This tiny feature makes watching these videos a bit easier.