YouTube's parent company Google has announced on its blog that automatic captions are to begin to roll out across the site. The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found on 13 channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels.

Ken Harrenstien, who is the software engineer behind the technology is deaf.
"The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me," Mr Harrenstien wrote in the Google blog.

His solution combines automatic speech recognition with the current caption system.
The translation is not always perfect (in a demonstration the phrase "sim card" becomes "salmon" in text), but Mr Harrenstien says that the technology "will continue to improve with time".

Alternatively users can upload a transcript of their video and auto-timing algorithms will match the text to the words as they are spoken.

Cool, another great way to make YouTube more usable.