In exactly three weeks, on Monday September 28, YouTube will officially get rid of community captions — the feature on videos that allows audience members to add captions to any video on the site so others who may need to read the captions while watching the video can do so.
The decision was actually first announced via a Google Support Forum post back on July 30th, but it really started to gain traction on Labor Day when #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs trended on Twitter. With the trend, fans gave the video site quite a bit of grief over what they saw as ableist actions making it harder for deaf people and those in the hard of hearing community to access and watch videos.
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All this may have started last August, when a YouTuber named JT made a video discussing how he’d found the community captions on several PewDiePie videos were completely wrong. In his video about the caption discovery, JT said in part (below):
“I found something on Pewdiepie’s translations where people were using it to self promote. It wasn’t just one video, it was loads of videos, because anybody can translate your video. I’m not sure what can be done, maybe Pewdiepie and Jacksepticeye can approve [translations] before they make their videos available. But people at this stage are abusing the system.”
From there, more people took notice of the community-run caption and translation system.
In the original Google Support Forum post, YouTube execs explained their decision to shut down community captions at the end of the month, writing (below):
“Both creators and viewers have reported problems with the community contributions feature, including spam, abuse, and low quality submissions. As a result, the feature is rarely used with less than 0.001% of channels having published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month.”
Hmmm….
Even with whatever little statistical use they may have, the pro-caption community has been loud on Twitter throughout Monday morning.
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Users from around the world are asking YouTube to re-think their “ableist” response to the caption mess, with many Twitter accounts responding with messages like this on the hashtag #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs (below):
“It’s 2020 and you’re REMOVING an accessible feature?”
“If y’all could just stop being ableist towards deaf people that would be nice”
“If there’s a problem with them…why not figure out how to fix it (rather than delete it)? we need *more* accessibility features for deaf, HOH, and international viewers please, not less.”
“the fact that they’re doing this when literally no one wanted community captions removed proves that they think they can do anything they want because they’re the biggest video sharing platform”
“I am a Disabled Content creator on your platform i have Cerebral palsy which besides my arms legs affects my voice i have 8k subs many of them are from non English speaking countries a majority have disabilities #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs”
“Reading CCs on YouTube helps me understand if they’re talking too fast or in a different language. For my lovely friends that are deaf/trying to watch videos in languages other than their mother tongue, I’m sorry this is happening to you.”
Of course, members of the deaf and hard of hearing community have long had to rely on things like community captions to watch and understand videos on the network that they otherwise may not have been able to enjoy. Heck, it took right up until 1990 that the Television Decoder Circuitry Act made closed captions a requirement on TV, too, so the deaf community has long been fighting a battle for better accessibility when it comes to videos.
For what it’s worth, international and multi-lingual YouTube viewers are also up in arms over the proposed change, as captions have long helped them better understand videos in other languages and bridge the gap in their knowledge about words and phrases in languages they are learning. Talk about an important tool, taken away just like that!
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To think that YouTube is ready to just pull the plug on captions rather than work on a fix for them is disheartening, to say the least. We get it, the system is being abused — then change it, or fix it! Don’t just scrap it when a whole community needs it to watch videos in the first place!
Still other users pointed out that YouTube may only be removing community captions — the ability community members have in adding to captions — and not closed captioning functions in general. However, YouTube’s automatic captioning option relying on voice recognition software has historically been very, very poor.
Thoughts, Perezcious readers? Are we way off on this one or do you agree? Share with us your take on everything down in the comments (below)…
[Image via YouTube]
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