Some people with perfectly good hearing like closed captions because they can more easily see what someone said. It’s especially good for fantasy or sci-fi, where they may not be using any real words at all, but if you’re not fully paying attention, you may not know what they said. For the hearing, closed captions is a luxury, something they can do without, but saves them from rewinding when they didn’t hear or notice something.
For the deaf, closed captions is the only way to enjoy videos, movies, and TV shows. Much of the dialog happens off screen, and lip reading isn’t a science. It’s difficult, requires a lot of guesswork, and is mostly up to interpretation of a situation. That doesn’t help for a YouTube video or movie. That’s why the deaf relied on community closed captions. This allowed people to add their own closed captions for videos. It meant people could translate the captions for a larger audience, add non-verbal cues (a popular on in horror films is, [suspenseful music]), and generally make the video actually enjoyable for someone who can’t hear it.
Now, despite pleas, YouTube removed the vital feature. They haven’t given reason besides the fact that it wasn’t very popular.
Basically? YouTube threw their deaf users under the bus because it chose to ignore their use of the feature.
Automatic Captions Fails
Ah, yes, Leaf Encore, the go-to site for tech news and apple news.
Automatic captions try to perform voice to text. However, music in videos, background noise, accents, or just rapid or unclear speech could easily cause it to miscaption the video. This means deaf users would still have to sort of read between the lines, trying to suss out meaning from potentially jumbled text. The algorithm could have to split out music lyrics, different speakers, people talking over one another, and other audio difficulties. Frankly, for some videos, its less reliable than lip reading.
A Community Helping Each Other
YouTube frequently likes to paint its creators as a “community.” They feature year-end wrap-up videos that show some of their most popular creators interacting with each other. The truth is, there are little communities within YouTube. It has nothing to do with anything YouTube is doing right, more the fact that YouTube’s algorithms, ads, and poor monetization for creators leave them relying on promoting each other to get enough views to profit off of their share of ads. It’s like how all the people at a terrible company band together as close friends at the bar after work.
I told them for a full freakin' hour why we need community contribution. Not just for deaf people so more channels will have captions, but for disabled creators who can't manually do them or have the income to pay for them: which is most of us. They do not care about us.
— Rikki Poynter (@rikkipoynter) July 31, 2020
Similarly, the deaf community and those with hearing but the desire to help, rely on each other for things like closed captions. A person with hearing could cut through the noise of a discussion, accurately labeling who’s talking, where they are off screen, separating out music, and describing anything happening off-screen. Bilingual users could translate for each other, so anyone can enjoy anyone else’s videos.
The fact is, this was a necessary and popular feature among those who needed it. Not liked it, not wanted it, needed it. Accessibility is vital, not just because it helps more people use your product, but because it’s the right thing to do. No one should be turned away from a business for a reason outside of their own control.
An Issue of Moderation
YouTube says the feature “failed to gain traction.” I don’t think YouTube understands accessibility. You see, you don’t put a ramp in front of your store because you expect most customers to use it, you put it there because if someone needs it, they should have equal access. It’s not about profit, it’s about ensuring that everyone has a fair chance.
With community contributions, anyone could add their own closed captions. That means someone could add captions that aren’t correct, or that say something completely different than whatever the people in the video are saying. Furthermore, translations could carry the same burden, with creators being unable to easily fix their captions. Trolls could even use idioms or key phrases, ones that wouldn’t be easy to catch, even when ran through a translator.
However, this is a similar problem for all online content. YouTube could monitor closed captions for potential abuse. They could contact creators to verify information. YouTube didn’t even notify creators when someone had submitted captions, yet required them to approve all captions. This was part of their adoption problem. Fixing community captions was all well within YouTube’s capabilities. But why increase funding for accessibility when YouTube has already decided they have too few deaf users to care?
YouTube’s making a clear choice here: profits over accessibility. Money over people. They decided that they’d rather lose their deaf users than put the investment into supporting them.
YouTube Failing Users… Again
YouTube seems to consistently fail their users. However, upload limits and monetization issues on other platforms like Vimeo mean small creators need YouTube’s free platform to get started. Standing by as YouTube demonetizes LGBTQ content, hides iOS features behind paywalls, and now removes features that deaf users need is just too much. Content creators and users need to take a stand. If YouTube won’t change, it’s not worth our time.
Sources:
- Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica
- Cherlynn Low, Engadget
- Kim Lyons, The Verge
- MIX, The Next Web