Now 360mn deaf people can also enjoy Facebook's live videos with closed captioning

Closed captioning, which was developed in the 1970s to make television accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers, is useful and needed now more than ever before. That's specifically because people with hearing disabilities cover over 5 percent of the world's population, which is 360 million people. A figure that Facebook, the social media giant, cannot miss.

Facebook, who believes people engage more with videos that have captions, is extending video closed captioning to Live broadcasts. This means, people with hearing disabilities, will also be able to enjoy videos that are broadcasted live.

Notably, not all Live videos will have closed captions because the functionality depends on the publisher instead of Facebook. “With this update, publishers using the Live API can now add CEA-608 standard closed captions to Facebook Live broadcasts, opening up those videos to audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing,” Facebook product manager Supratik Lahiri said in a blog post. “People who have their captioning settings turned on will then automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts on mobile and desktop whenever they’re available.”

Both the publisher and viewer need to activate the settings to avail the feature. These captions will appear to users on both mobile and desktop if they enable the setting. According to Facebook, one in five videos posted to the site are now Live broadcasts. This means a major portion of videos will now be accessible to the hearing impaired for the first time.

Jeffrey Wieland, Facebook's director of accessibility, told USA Today, "It's absolutely an imperative for the deaf and hard of hearing community, so our hope really is that we can continue to build more and more tools in the captioning space that increase the amount of videos that have to caption both real time and otherwise."

For years, Facebook has already been offering captions for the regular videos and advertisements. However, closed captions can be inaccurate, especially for Live broadcasts. And this happened with none other than the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. During his commencement speech, the speech recognition system wasn't working properly, and most of his lines were being presented incorrectly.

lol this is the opposite of what he said pic.twitter.com/FNm5i3DZGm

— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) May 25, 2017

However, this mishap turned out to be Harvard's fault, not Facebook's.

Closed captioning for Live is available now, so if you want to try the feature, just broadcast a live video on Facebook.