To mark World Accessibility Consciousness Day, Microsoft has introduced a serious accessibility improve for PowerPoint on Mac: customers can now generate captions for embedded movies straight throughout the app utilizing speech recognition.

This growth builds upon earlier accessibility enhancements from Microsoft. As an example, the corporate expanded SRT file assist in PowerPoint again in January, making it simpler for customers throughout platforms to import professionally created or self-made caption information for movies of their slides.

Peter Wu, a Principal Software program Engineer on the PowerPoint group, emphasised the necessity, noting that captions are important for the 5% of the world’s inhabitants who’re deaf or laborious of listening to, and that fifty% of Individuals really want watching movies with captions more often than not. Right here is how Microsoft says the brand new era function works:

1. Open a brand new or present presentation in PowerPoint in your Mac gadget and embed a video.
2. Choose the video, then choose Playback > Edit Captions. You may also discover the Edit Captions button within the context menu that seems whenever you right-click on the video, or within the Accessibility tab that seems when Accessibility Assistant is open.

3. Choose the Generate Captions from: dropdown menu beneath the Closed Captions pane on the suitable aspect of your presentation, then choose the language spoken within the video. When the captions are performed producing, they’ll seem within the Closed Captions pane.

4. Choose a textual content cue to view that a part of the video. Examine the spoken dialogue with the textual content cue and edit if wanted.

5. Translate captions into extra languages by deciding on the Translate to: dropdown menu, then deciding on the language you need to translate them into.
   NOTE: The translated captions will seem within the Closed Captions pane when translation is finished.

6. Choose to see the checklist of all captions tracks for the video.

7. From right here, insert extra tracks, take away a observe, and/or reorder the tracks.

8. When you have a favourite app or service for captioning movies that may save the captions as a WebVTT or SRT file, insert the file into your presentation by deciding on Insert Captions from File within the Closed Captions pane.

NOTE: You may choose a number of information directly.

As soon as generated, these captions aren’t simply slapped on and forgotten. Customers can overview and edit them for accuracy or readability, apply formatting like daring or italics, and even translate them into different languages. The system additionally helps including speaker names or describing non-dialogue sounds, like “[phone ringing]”. Microsoft additionally factors out that presenting utilizing PowerPoint Stay in Groups permits every participant to pick out their most well-liked captions observe independently.

This caption era function is at present rolling out to PowerPoint for Mac Beta Channel customers working Model 16.98 (Construct 25050401) or later. As is typical with beta options, it would take a bit for everybody within the channel to see it.

Talking of accessibility, Google additionally, in celebration of yesterday’s World Accessibility Consciousness Day, introduced a slate of recent AI-driven options for Android and Chrome. These included developments like Gemini-powered picture descriptions in TalkBack and extra expressive real-time captions.