If you are a Google+ user and like using Hangouts a lot, you may not know that Google just added a new feature for the Hangouts. It’s called Hangout Captions. Hangout Captions is a live closed captioning service where you have a person who will type what everybody is saying/signing in the hangout.

I was a part of the beta tester- you can see the video below (I am on the far-right):

This new feature is absolutely amazing tool for all deaf and hard of hearing community. There are so many ideas you can use this accessibiltiy feature with, for example, group school project, government, business meeting, etc.

“By adding the +Hangout Captions app, you can either connect live text from a professional transcriptionist to your Hangout, or type right into a text box yourself to transcribe a Hangout for your friends,” Naomi Black, technical program manager for accessibility engineering wrote in a post on Google+.

“Right now, we only support professional transcription through StreamText and our ‘do-it-yourself’ Basic Transcription. This is an early look at the app so you can tell us what you think.”

Recently, Google finally added closed captioning to the YouTube videos on Google+ which was not enabled but is currently enabled for official YouTube page. We are very excited to see Google+ community, going strong with pretty good accessibility features. It is available right now and you can see for yourself, go over to this page here.

Have you used it before? If so, please leave your opinions or questions down below. We’d be happy to oblige, giving comments and answers to any of your feedback!

Source: Hangout Captions for Google+

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