YouTube Plans to Get Rid of Community Captions

 YouTube has provided people with a platform to create and view videos for free. It has been very successful and is now valued to be $20 billion. Because of its massive success, it has been able to bring together people from all walks of life, creating a virtual world of its own. So, when it was announced that YouTube would get rid of its community captions, it created an uproar. The decision didn’t go well, especially with the hard-of-hearing people for whom captions are a godsend.

Community captions have been an excellent tool for viewers to contribute to the creation of a video. It has helped them get involved and aid their favorite stars to get their work done. Not just that, the captions have also been a life-saver for deaf or hear-of-hearing people. It has helped them enjoy the content like everyone else. But with the latest developments, it seems their viewing experience is at stake.

YouTube will remove the community caption feature by 28th September 2020. However, it has made clear that the creators can still use their own captions or third-party tools. While announcing the discontinuation, it was also said that the feature was very rarely used.

The issue is much broader than what it has been made to seem by YouTube. Although the company is reluctant to admit, the move will definitely stifle accessibility. The community caption feature lets the creators make videos without having to worry much about the captions. The viewers can contribute, and the captions can then be added to the video. The move is not only discriminatory towards people who are deaf, but it also poses a big problem for the small creators who have fewer resources. They will struggle to connect financially. The community caption helped them make their content available to people who speak different languages for free. Now that the feature is to be discontinued, they will have an uphill struggle to continue producing their videos for all of their viewers.

But it is worth mentioning that YouTube’s community captions have downsides as well. It was found out last year that viewers were deliberately adding abusive comments to videos of popular creators with an agenda to belittle them.

Undoubtedly, it was YouTube’s mistake that it failed to make the caption feature more popular. There is still a lot of ignorance as far as the feature is concerned. This is because of the fact that the company hardly tried to promote the feature to the masses.

The silver lining to this move is that the community-captions that are already posted will be available even after discontinuation. The creators can now make use of Google’s in-built captions. Also, they will have the option to accept contributions that are already made. Apart from all the above options, they can create subtitles manually as well. YouTube has also promised to give the creators a six-month subscription of Amara, which is a captioning service. They have also arranged special pricing for subtitling and language services.

It seems that YouTube is really trying to deal with the backlash by giving its creators all the offers. But the creators, as well as users, are not really impressed. They think that the company is not taking care of their needs. It doesn’t seem likely that all offers are going to make any difference. YouTube needs to listen to smaller creators as well. It needs to be more open-minded and empathetic to the needs of its viewers and creators alike.

Source-YouTube Plans