
YouTube to end community captions feature and deaf creators aren’t happy - vermontdevil
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21349401/youtube-community-captions-deaf-creators-accessibility-google
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macintux
Ongoing discussion here since last night:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004573)

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Zenst
Bad move as some channels love that their content gets translations into other
languages as helps them and they can't afford to pay for that and it's
fans/supporters/people learning that create that. That's all going to go.

What they should and hopefully will still do is - allow it to happen still,
but give control to the content creator to authorise it and only authorised is
public. That way you get the best of it all. Then you would have a way to
acknowledge any abuse/spam and get on that instead of liberally tarnishing all
community captioners as spammy evil people who should be stopped as that is
how they are doing it. Playing the, we're doing this as bad things happen
focus and utterly and completely ignoring every positive good aspect of this.
A pattern many a company/government uses and still don't make it right. This
approach is what I call "Think of the children 2.0", same thing in effect,
just more meanutiatered and subtle approach and yet still heavy on the
blinkers.

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Fej
It looks like it will still be possible, but only through a paid third-party
service.

I suppose Google thinks auto-captions are enough to satisfy the ADA. We'll
see.

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jschwartzi
They're not. You should see how the auto-captions work for the Scottish guy
who does 1Bike1World.

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EricE
Heh - so much for diversity and support of minority communities despite all of
Google's virtue signaling around how much they value and support them.

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R0b0t1
I remember reading some Ivy put up a bunch of course material for free and was
sued under the ADA so they took it down. This article made me think of that.
To what extent are YouTube or content creators responsible for producing
accessible material?

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samstave
Youtube seems to be being run by idiots? All their decisions I have been
seeing over the last ~year all ___appear_ __to me to be idiotic. But I dont
know their business - anyone care to elucidate?

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evv
YouTube crushed their competition years ago. Of course the product is going to
shit- there is no motivation to improve.

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edjrage
I get the no improvement part, but why _make it worse_ by removing stable,
useful features? How much maintenance does it need? What are they gaining from
this?

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Glant
From the YouTube help page

"This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we’re
removing them to focus on other creator tools. You can still use your own
captions, automatic captions, and third-party tools and services."

That seems fair enough to me. Creators can still add captions, it's just
viewers that can't add them without a 3rd party service.

