
A History of YouTube’s Closed Captions Part II: Bringing It All Together - themadprogramer
https://datahorde.org/?p=1346
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Normille
I'm not hearing impaired but, when reading t'intarwebs in bed, I'll quite
often watch a YouTube video with the sound off and closed captions on, so as
not to disturb the missus.

The thing that makes YouTube's closed captions nearly unusable for me is that
they take up two lines and the lines scroll. Even if you adjust the font size
to he much bigger, they just take up more room. There's no option to configure
the captions to be on a single line.

If the video in question features someone speaking, there'll be quite a lot of
continual text and, with autogenerated CCs, [which the vast majority are] a
lot of it will be slightly wrong.

So I'll read the top line and start reading the bottom line which will
suddenly scroll up, so it's now the top line, thus adding another fraction of
a second for my eye-line to re-orientate, to the extra time my brain's already
taken to process what _$RandomIrrelevantWord_ in the middle of the sentence
should actually be. By the time I've done that, the line has often scrolled up
again out of sight, to be replaced by whatever line was previously the bottom
line.

Rinse and repeat continuously.

It might sound counter-intuitive but if I could set the CC to only occupy one
line, I'm sure I could read them faster and easier as the line would stay in
the same place and not suddenly move upwards. Or, alternatively, keep them on
two lines but replace the entire two lines each time. Don't scroll them.

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 _cf._ also: Apple's Finder column view. What lunatic decided that making an
tem slide out of the way when you click to select it was good GUI design?

