YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature on September 28 due to lack of use and spam abuse; critics contend it will stifle accessibility
Kim Lyons / The Verge : Tweets: @mmithsgolden , @teamyoutube , @arcillamatthew , @yoongilip , @teamyoutube , @robertoblake , @realbisqwit , @jessicaootc , and @theplamzjoker Tweets: @mmithsgolden : in september youtube is getting rid of community captions which means that deaf/hard of hearing people will have to pay for subtitles on their videos. if you could just spare a minute to read/sign this it would be appreciated! https://www.change.org/... @teamyoutube : @cybernova Just want to clarify, YouTube is not making any money from this. We specifically partnered with Amara to help creators during this transition, they're a non-profit that invests in accessibility programs and has crowd-sourced caption options. Details here: https://yt.be/... Matthew Arcilla / @arcillamatthew : YT says the feature was “rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse” which is a disingenuous way to interpret the community's relationship to it, and also covers up their failure to promote. Bet you they barely even investigated that assumption. https://www.theverge.com/... Drew / @yoongilip : this is a huge blow to the deaf/HoH community but also just kpop in general, kpop fans often rely on community submitted captions for translations of official content without official subtitles... this is extremely negligent to the needs of the user base https://twitter.com/... @teamyoutube : @robertoblake @YouTube We're committed to building accessibility and caption tools, including new/better tools directly in Studio. In the meantime, we'll cover the cost of accessibility non-profit Amara to crowdsource captions for interested eligible creators. Details here: https://yt.be/... @robertoblake : UPDATE FROM YOUTUBE Information on depreciation of community caption contributions. Glad to hear a response on this! cc @rikkipoynter https://twitter.com/... Joel Yliluoma / @realbisqwit : In a longstanding tradition of removing useful features from YouTube, they're now removing community captions.https://support.google.com/ ... The problems are real, I admit that. However, I see a business choice: See the note about “special pricing”. IOW, it's about removing competition. Jessica Kellgren-Fozard / @jessicaootc : Really sad to see Community Captions being axed from YouTube. The tool helped me a lot when I was a small creator and I will always be grateful to my audience who put in work to caption in so many different languages. https://support.google.com/... https://twitter.com/... @theplamzjoker : YouTube is removing yet another feature. This has become so tiresome that I can't even be arsed to detail it here anymore, so I'll just share this screenshot of my immediate thoughts. https://support.google.com/... https://twitter.com/...