"If hearing people and the like can enjoy the content, then why can't we, too?"
Jack Edwards doesn't want praise for doing what he considers the bottom line: making his videos accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers.
Edwards started making book and lifestyle videos on YouTube five years ago, but he only started captioning all of his videos in January. "One of my goals this year was to invest more time in making it easier for viewers to access my channel," he says. "I always think of the quote," It's a privilege to learn, rather than to experiment, "and that's true for many accessibility issues. I don't rely on subtitles to enjoy YouTube content, so it's easy to forget what other people are doing."
Captions increased 30 percent until a year
More creators like Edwards have captioned their videos over the past year, providing subtitles so more viewers can interact with their content without having to hear or understand the audio.
It's an outcome that deaf activists deemed nearly impossible nearly a year ago, when YouTube removed community caption contributions. Most YouTube channels don't upload captions for their videos, so subscribers sign up to volunteer high-quality subtitles for fellow viewers to read. However, in September, YouTube removed the feature that allowed captions by viewer, citing "low use" and "abuse." The creators had to start making annotations themselves.
When the plans were first announced in April 2020, YouTube deaf Rikki Poynter, a prolific activist, gave me very grim forecasts. “Community contributions have provided us with more caption channels and now we're going to risk owning a little bit of that.” Half a million people signed an online petition asking YouTube to overturn the decision, and thousands of Twitter users got the hashtag #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs in September.
Viewers encouraged creative people to fill in the gaps
But over the past year, more creators have started adding their own captions. Compared to August - a month before the community closed captions - the total captions a user submitted in January were up by more than 20 percent, a YouTube spokesperson told me. On an annual basis, from January 2020 to January 2021, the increase was more than 30 percent.
"We are delighted that our content creators find our captions tools useful for their videos," the spokesperson said via email.
Although new tools such as the new caption editor and the ability to add captions were made available during the upload process in July 2020 and May 2021, respectively, for some, the incentive to start captions came from elsewhere: their viewers.
Kennie JD, who said, “I got a message on Twitter about how YouTube was planning to drop an important [closed translation] feature a few months ago, and it could mean that there won't be any hard of hearing viewers.” She creates makeup videos and movies for an audience of close to 570,000 people. . "I found this terrible, so I was paying for a service called Rev.com that is creating captions for my videos after they go up."
"If people listen and can enjoy the content, why can't we too?"
Poynter suggests that more awareness of the importance of captions is the reason for the 20 percent increase - that, and the idea that creators “have no other choice now,” as they cannot count on viewers to fill the void. Whatever the reason, it is not the only one benefiting from the increase in translation. "[They] also are people with ADHD, or auditory processing disorder, or [those] who learn whatever spoken language is included in the video. So many groups of people are lost," she says. "If hearing people and the like can enjoy the content, then why can't we, too?"
Poor quality comments don't help things improve either. YouTube provides automatic captions through speech recognition, but many deaf users consider them inaccurate and unreliable.
So it falls to deaf activists and YouTubers like Poynter to invite others to write their annotations. "I used to send several personal emails to several YouTubers annually asking them to comment on their content," she says. "During the seasons of VidCon and Playlist Live for a few years, I personally typed letters and mailed them to them."
YouTube added the ability to add captions in its 'Upload Stream' earlier this month. In the past, the social media site failed to promote caption features well.
Poynter notes that the reported increase in manual captions is significant, but that it still needs more promotion. Right now, it seems, the community is doing YouTube business.
"[Captioning] is something I hope all full-time content creators start with," says Edwards. "While it's really cool to receive a little 'thank you' as a token of someone's appreciation, it's also important to get to know the most important work that deaf or hard of hearing content creators do on the platform."
Commenting on YouTube's recent caption promotion in a tweet, Poynter said, “They will need to be more consistent about this. I like that the uploading process is now much easier [how to add captions]. When people actually see it, they are more likely to like it. Its most likely use. "
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