The Philippine Online Chronicles

In an effort to expand its accesibility, video site You Tube introduced the automatic caption, or auto-caption feature to all videos on the site in English.

This significant development will reportedly benefit millions of hearing impaired Internet users as auto-caption uses speech-to-text technology to generate subtitles. It is an expansion of the speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using late last year.

Since 2008, You Tube users have been able to manually add captions to videos and last year, it began offering machine-generated captions for partner channels.

According to You Tube product manager Hiroto Tokusei, "Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube." He said the auto-captioning feature will make YouTube videos "more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages."

Studies predict that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015.

The auto-caption feature currently works for videos where English is spoken but users can use Google's automatic translation service to simultaneously translate the captions into 50 other languages.

Auto-captioning in more languages will be added "in the months to come," Agence France Presse reported.

YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web's most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day, Yahoo News posted.