However, others, including YouTuber JT, have shown the abuse people receive via the community contributions feature. One group even created a popular petition ‘ Don’t remove community captions from YouTube’. This is something automatic captioning also doesn’t do well. Part of the fuss over the end of community captions is that community contributions also enabled people to translate videos into foreign languages. Sadly, as much innovation as Google created for captions in both Google Video and YouTube, some are saying that YouTube has gone from ‘caption-hero to villain’.Įven YouTube acknowledges, “Subtitles and closed captions open up your content to a larger audience, including deaf or hard of hearing viewers or those who speak languages besides the one spoken in your video.” The versatility of human-generated captionsĬommunity-generated captions were priceless for many in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community because they were a way to source high-quality captions, from people inside the community who knew and understood their access needs.īut not only that. For example, his patent read: “Enabling users to create, to edit and/or to rate online video captions over the web.” The Google employee and blogger who first announced closed captioning on Google Video, Ken Harrenstien, was one of the most persistent champions and innovative developers of Google’s closed captioning innovations. Google acquired YouTube in October 2006, but it took YouTube until Jto support video annotations, which people hacked for captions and subtitles. In fact, Google Video announced closed captioning back in September 2006. Google was an early innovator and historically strong advocate for closed captioning.

The decision has been an emotional one for a lot of people in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.Ĭontent creators now have three remaining options for captioning their videos: create their own captions, turn on automatic captions (which are notoriously low-quality), or use third-party tools and services. YouTube said that they are discontinuing the feature because it “was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse.” This feature allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles and descriptions to videos. On September 28, 2020, YouTube ended its community contributions across all channels. Why We Shouldn’t Give Up on Closed Captioning for YouTube

Youtube closed captioning automatic