Popular online video sharing website YouTube will start providing automatic captions to videos to make the site more accessible to the deaf and people with hearing difficulties.

The Google-owned company will be using its own proprietary speech technology. The target is to start with English language videos first then followed by other languages in the succeeding months.  This initiative began with the help of University of California (Berkeley), Yale University, Stanford University, PBS and National Geographic.

The California School for the Deaf praised the project saying that it was an invaluable service.

“Now we really can completely understand what is going on and we feel like we are on an equal playing field,” said a student from the school.

The company noted however that the captioning will not be perfect as its success for translating voices to words will depend on the quality of the audio component of a video. Improvements are expected to be implemented in the future.