Facebook announced that the making Facebook accessible to everyone is a key part of building global community. Facebook is allowing publishers to include closed captions in Facebook Live, helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience live videos. Now, if your captioning settings are turned on, you’ll automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts when they’re available.

Over the past year, daily watch time for Facebook Live broadcasts has grown by more than 4x, and 1 in 5 Facebook videos is a Live broadcast. By enabling publishers to include closed captions with their Live broadcasts, hope more people can now participate in the exciting moments that unfold on Live.

How it works

Closed captions help make video content accessible to everyone in the Facebook community. Facebook now enables publishers to add closed captions to their Facebook Live broadcasts using
the CEA-608 closed captions standard. Captions using this standard can now be ingested into Facebook Live broadcasts through the Facebook Live API.

To enable closed captions:
1. Before you go live, set up a third-party tool or start working with a third-party caption provider to enable live captions for your broadcast. Options include Ai-Media and Telestream.
2. Along with the video footage you capture in your live broadcast, insert or pass through embedded CEA-608 captions data into the live encoder.
3. Stream your live broadcast feed via the Facebook Live API.

People can then view embedded closed captions for your broadcast in a Facebook experience on Android, iOS, or web browsers.