YouTube Wants To Get Rid Of Captions | Rikki Poynter

YouTube's @creatorinsider announces that they are considering retiring the community contribution captions feature (NOT captions as a whole- just this feature), an important accessibility tool that not only allowed deaf and hard of hearing people to watch videos with captions, but allowed creators that could not afford to financially invest in captions. It is also an important feature for disabled creators who cannot afford captions and also cannot create captions themselves.

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YouTube Wants To Get Rid Of Captions | Rikki Poynter

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Rikki Poynter is a 28-year- old deaf vlogger on YouTube. She makes content about deaf awareness, accessibility/closed captioning awareness, mental health, feminism, and more. Since making her first deaf related video on October 1st, 2014, Rikki has been on the Huffington Post, Mic News, Upworthy, ABC News, BBC Newsbeat, BBC Ouch, BBC See Hear, and other news outlets in various countries. Also, she has been working on her new closed captioning campaign, Lights, Camera, Caption!, to try to get more YouTubers to closed caption their videos. After hopefully one day taking over YouTube, she wants to work on the rest of the Internet.

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[rikkipoynter]

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[chloe]

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever tried suing YouTube over lack of accessible captions? I’m starting to think begging and pleading isn’t going to be enough anymore. Didn’t people basically have to sue the federal government to make captions available on tv and movies?

[Kellieirvinn]

I feel like Youtube would lose a huge part of their audience if they take away captions, if a video doesn't have a captions option I most likely will click out

[jooleebilly]

WTF are they thinking at YouTube? There's a pretty easy workaround to stop trolling in community captions: Give the creator final approval before adding the CC to the video.



Giving deaf and HOH people the means to enjoy a video is reason enough for community caption availability. *HOWEVER*, if you need even MORE justification than that: I use them all the time when I don't understand someone's accent, when I need to keep the volume low/off late at night, and most recently, my roommate came from Brazil and could read English better than she understood spoken English. We always had the CC on so we could both enjoy the content. I mention these because YouTube seems to need a monetary incentive in addition to the "it's the right thing to do" incentive. So there you have it. More people need captions than you think. These people watch your ads. When you combine ALL OF US, Deaf, HOH, English learners, late-night watchers, et al, that's a lot of people you're cutting off. Ahem. I meant to say: A large revenue stream you're cutting off.


One more point. I've joined Nebula and if I find they do a better job with CC availability, I will make it my mission to stop watching YouTube entirely if they don't bother to come up with a better solution than "We've tried NOTHING and we're all out of ideas."

[reverendmothercheryl]

You have my voice in this. I just left a comment favoriting that they ask us, deaf and disabled viewers first. Quite frankly, the automatic captions suck. They constantly mistranslated words and end up making up nonsense. Community captions, properly managed are a much better option. I hope we win this fight!

[JessieArt]

If they take away captions I will edit my own english captions into my art videos because this is totally unfair for people who are deaf. I honestly hope they don't because that is SO inconsiderate. It makes me so mad that they're even considering it!

[dean]

I was staring at my screen in bafflement the entire video, wondering whose idea this is and what on Earth they're thinking, but then I remembered my folly in presuming that YouTube _thinks_ before it acts...
Heading over to that comment section now, hoping they'll actually _pay attention_ this time around... smh

[DeafinitelyWanderlust]

Completely infuriating. They CAN find some ways to make it work around the troll and abuse but no, of course, they'd do this instead. The community contribution captions feature has been so helpful!

[liamodonovan]

That totally wrong taking away something so vital to people with disabilities that's discrimination against people with disabilities love you rikki I really hope they save it

[Eli_Arch]

Ugh, how are they ignoring the NEED so many people have for captions! Big YouTubers/abled YouTubers WILL NOT do "all the work" to pay for captions....
I'm so mad right now :(

[GamingWithJ]

I’m hard of hearing and I kind of need these captions

[KathrynsRavens]

Captions are so helpful for so many people. I really don't think they understand the reach of accessibility tools and how groups not targeted by them also benefit!

[coolcatcami]

As a deaf person, I hope YouTube doesn’t take away captions. Most of the time when I watch YouTubers like Jacksepticeye, I tend to click on the search options with captions so I can find videos that are available with captions but it sucks that every video doesn’t come with captions. I enjoyed this video since it gave a lot of info. Thanks Rikki! #savecaptions 😔

[mypieyourfork]

If someone starts a petition, I'll sign. Captioning changed my life. Growing up on VHS, I wasn't introduced to captioning until my late elementary/early high school years. Why are we going backwards??

[DarkVioletgirl]

I left a comment on that video. I don't know why they are even thinking about throwing out feature when they barely advertised it and didn't even bother to address on the issues with it to improve community captions. This is bad marketing research as a whole and just completely ignoring to the deaf and disabled community is just messed up. Improve on the feature, not get rid of it!

[JennaGetsCreative]

Stats says 10-15% of my audience on any given video uses my subtitles. This implies to me that 10-15% of the audiences on my friends' similar channels would also use subtitles if they had them. If I can't convince them to caption themselves, I can at least caption FOR them. Why on Earth would YouTube want to take that away?! *runs off to yell at Creator Insider*

[fashioneyesta]

Community contributions has really helped me as a disabled creator who doesn’t have the means to caption all my my own videos. The fact that YouTube wants to remove them instead of investing some time and money into safeguarding this feature is so disappointing.

[KomoliRihyoh]

A feature on their site which is used to provide an essential element of accessibility to their users is subpar in quality and execution, and their solution is to not the system better but instead remove it entirely? What? Is there not ONE person on their team or that they spoke to who would bring up why they need this feature??? This is why diversity in companies is not just for "filling a quota, " but to provide necessary feedback from those who are directly affected by company decisions.

[marksmithisonyoutub]

Well, the sad truth about YouTube's "Community Contributions" option is that not very many people seem to activate that function. For Instance: Nearly all of the channels I watch don't offer their viewers the option of Uploading better Captions and all they offer are those "Auto-Generated" Captions. When I spent a solid 6-to-7 weeks writing out Caption Files for a favorite YouTube Channel of mine so that a Hard-Of-Hearing friend of mine could better enjoy that channel's content, and then requested in a Comment that I had written for one of that channel's videos back in March to please allow me to E-Mail her the Caption Files so that their videos could have better Captions, the owner of that Channel immediately became furious with me, apparently misinterpreting my request for her to Caption her videos as me basically telling her that nobody could understand her because of her accent. She then proceeded to say that I was making her "look bad" which was, in turn making her "feel bad" and expressed that she felt that my request for better Captioning was a "Hate Comment". I wrote her the most honest, sincere, heartfelt apology, only to slowly realize several minutes later that I had been blocked from further Commenting on her YouTube Channel. Yeah, things got quite heated! It was a really ugly situation for me! Immediately after becoming upset with me, that YouTube Channel abruptly stopped Captioning their Instagram stories and they also started recording their new YouTube videos in such way that confuses the "Auto-Generated" Captioning system. She thereby made her content as inaccessible as she possibly could, so that her channel would be exclusive to those who have excellent hearing. EVERYTHING on that YouTube Channel now requires the viewer to be capable of HEARING in order to access it. As soon as she minimized "Accessibility" on her YouTube Channel, her Subscriber count instantly dropped by the hundreds and her video views (which used to routinely range between 200 to 400) have swiftly plummeted all the way down into only the 60's & 70's! I've spent the past few months hoping that deaf or Hard-Of-Hearing people could start leaving Comments on the videos on that YouTube Channel and/or sending the channel owner Direct Messages on Instagram requesting that she start Captioning her videos. She's such a hilarious Storyteller and tells some of the funniest stories...Too bad that the viewer must have great hearing in order to know what happened here and there and here and so on and so forth...People just don't seem to take requests for better Captioning seriously if they're coming from people like me who hear fine but, rather, they seem to be more likely to honor such a request if they're coming from people who are deaf or Hard-Of-Hearing. But that YouTube Channel owner would pretty much honor requests for better Captioning from ANYONE...except for me, at this point. This YouTube Channel I'm thinking of (but will not name in this public forum) has absolutely 0% acknowledgement or accommodations being made, in terms of "Deaf Accessibility" whatsoever and some of THE worst "Auto-Generated" Captions I've EVER seen. Q&A sessions featuring a friend on FaceTime on a Tablet off-screen asking the Questions and the voice being too faint to get picked up by the "Auto-Generated" Captions and then she not repeating the Questions when she reads the Answers. A header in an Instagram story reading, "This Is My Favorite Song In The Whole World" but the song can only be identified by the viewer actually HEARING that song. Another Instagram story with a header reading, "I'm gonna say something very funny so listen up, " but not providing any Captioning for the funny joke that got told in the story. Rikki, I'm not sure whether you're still contacting YouTube Channel owners and urging them to provide proper Captioning for their videos...but if you wouldn't mind, please do send me a Direct Message on Instagram (if you do Direct Messaging, that is) @marksmithradio so I can inform you privately of what the specific YouTube Channel is...
 
If I ever heard anything about YouTube considering abandoning its practice of "Auto-Generated" Captioning, I'd have a fit! That would be "Moving In The Wrong Direction, " for sure! I'd like to assume that as time continues to go by and we continue to move further and further into the future, Google will continue to look into ways of improving the Accuracy & Effectiveness of its "Auto-Generated" Captioning feature for YouTube. Yeah, I get that YouTube's "Auto-Generated" Captioning contains Run-On Sentences and all but, hey, maybe that issue will be addressed in the years to come...You never know but I'd like to assume so...for as is the case for most of any form of Technology, hopefully "Auto-Generated" Captions will steadily improve as time goes by. Who knows, perhaps someday proper Sentence Structure & Punctuation might be in the works for "Auto-Generated" Captioning on YouTube...Who knows...While many people like to criticize Google's "Auto-Generated" Captioning feature for YouTube, I spend more of my energy being appreciative that at least YouTube offers some form of "Universal" Captioning feature (which neither Facebook nor Instagram offer) that, albeit, is imperfect but that's at least "Better Than Nothing"...So for that, I give two BIG Thumb's-Up to Google for their beloved "Auto-Generated" Captioning feature for YouTube! :-)

ALSO: Could somebody please list for me (in a Reply to this Comment) some Instagram pages that are currently working to make Videos that aren't Captioned more "Accessible"? I've heard that there are a few such Instagram pages out there, but I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how to go about finding them. ANYBODY is welcome to offer me this information in a Reply to this Comment. Any help you could offer would be greatly-appreciated. Thank You Very Much In Advance! :-)

I never mentioned this before but I'm on the Autism Spectrum. Specifically, I have Asperger's so, in a sense, although being deaf or Hard-Of-Hearing isn't my Disability, I do have a Disability of some form, which makes it easier for me to Empathize with people who have different Disabilities and, at the end of the day, see "People With Disabilities" as being more alike than we are different, even if our Disabilities differ from one another.

[shersmk]

Thank you for fighting so hard for all of us! Lots of love from a HOH viewer from the Netherlands!