Unless you closely follow most Google employees on Google+, you may have missed the announcement yesterday of a new feature that has been added to the Google+ video player. Google+ videos now have a closed caption option, allowing caption files to be uploaded along with the video.

The quiet announcement came via Google Accessibility Engineer James deBoer’s Google+ page, where he revealed the new feature on behalf of Google’s accessibility team. From the post:

Why add captions, you ask? Adding captions and subtitles makes your videos more accessible to people who can’t follow along with the audio — either because they speak a different language, or because they are deaf or hard of hearing.

As deBoer points out, the captions can be used as subtitles in videos featuring foreign languages. Though the new closed caption button on the Google+ video player does look the same as the one on YouTube, it is unclear whether Google+ allows the many closed captioning features that were added to YouTube earlier this year.

DeBoer went on to give a brief rundown of how uploading closed captions would work. As seen in the picture above, a user can open up a Google+ video in lightbox view and choose the “Closed captions” option in the “Options” menu at the bottom of the screen. From there, it is a simple matter of clicking on the “Add new captions or transcript” option and uploading the caption file.

(Picture courtesy James deBoer)