Instagram fails to address criticism over automatic captions update – Liam O’Dell

Instagram has updated its automatic captioning feature to remove its grey background, in a move which has been criticised by deaf people online over its poor visibility. The tool, which relies on speech recognition when turned on by an account, enables individuals – including deaf oeople – to access videos which aren’t manually captioned by the creator. Deaf twins Hermon and Heroda Berhane, who have more than 129,000 followers on the platform with the account ‘Being Her’, highlighted the issue in a video to their account on Tuesday. They said: “Before it was white text on a grey background. Now? Just white text, no background, nothing. “Look, we know the auto captions were never perfect anyway – that’s literally why we tell you guys to create your own subtitles, not just rely on the auto one – but at least before you could read them, and if you are a creator or brand [that] doesn’t add the subtitles at all, that’s ableism, period. “Now, if there’s a white wall or the outfits, anything light behind it, the text just disappears. Gone. “How does this even get approved?” It’s not known when the change to the access feature was introduced, though
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