YouTube plans to discontinue its community captioning feature, which allowed viewers to add captions to the videos, because “it was rarely used and had spam / abuse issues,” the company announced. He says he is removing the subtitles and will “focus on other authoring tools.” The feature will be removed starting September 28. “You can still use your own captions, auto captions, and third-party tools and services,” YouTube said in an update on its help page.
But deaf and hard-of-hearing creators say removing the caption feature from the community will stifle accessibility, and they want to see the company try to fix issues with captions created by volunteers, rather than removing them entirely. Deaf YouTuber Rikki Poynter said on her channel in May that community captions were an “accessibility tool that not only allowed deaf and hard of hearing people to watch captioned videos, but allowed creators who were unable to afford to invest financially in subtitles. “
She tweeted Thursday that she was disappointed with YouTube’s decision:
I told them for an hour why we need community input. Not only for deaf people, so more channels will have subtitles, but also for disabled creators who cannot do it manually or who do not have the income to pay for them: that we are most of us. They don’t care.
– Rikki Poynter ♀️ (@rikkipoynter) July 31, 2020
YouTuber JT, whose channel has more than 550,000 subscribers, highlighted the downside of the community’s caption feature last year, showing how viewers added abusive comments to videos from popular creators.
But many creators say they relied on subtitles not only to better reach deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but also to help translate their videos into other languages, giving them a wider audience.
It’s a shame YouTube removes community created captions. I am afraid it is not economically or practically feasible for my videos to be subtitled in languages other than English, I am afraid, so far I have had friendly volunteers to do submarines in foreign languages
– Philosophy Tube (@PhilosophyTube) July 30, 2020
British journalist Liam O’Dell, who first reported on YouTube’s decision, says that many creators of the deaf community viewed community captions as a poorly promoted feature, which was made more complicated by the decision last August of require creators to manually approve subtitles. Several users have regretted that YouTube has not publicized the function well or has highlighted it enough in the user interface to capture it.
YouTube said in an email to The edge Friday would provide creators who have used the community contribution feature on at least three videos in the past 60 days with a free six-month subscription to the captioning service Amara. Eligible creators will be notified in the coming weeks. Even if the creators don’t qualify for the deal, they can still use Amara’s tools, which include a free caption editor, according to YouTube.
O’Dell notes that the company has been hinting that the feature will disappear for a while; YouTube product manager James Dillard said in a video on the Creator Insider channel in April that “ultimately, it’s not that many creators are using it.”
A petition asking Google to reverse the decision has garnered more than 49,000 signatures as of Friday morning. “Removing community captions blocks so many viewers from the experience,” wrote petitioner Emma Wolfe.
