AFAIK, The YouTube implementation does all of those.
Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4
Please do not spread falsehoods.
Disclamer: I work at YouTube.
Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4
Please do not spread falsehoods.
Disclamer: I work at YouTube.
This is how my subtitles / closed captions have looked for me on youtube for a year or so now [1] (on up-to-date Mac Chrome). The font is extremely small and blurry and practically transparent, and there is a horrible background color, which is usually yellow until a week or so ago, but has now changed to green for Christmas.
All I want for Christmas is readable YouTube text. I'm so glad YouTube is trying to keep up with the season's festivities by changing the background color of their absolutely unreadable text from yellow to green, but shouldn't they try to make the text readable by default somehow instead? Maybe a point size larger than 10 points, and a transparency higher than 10 percent, and a neutral or at least less nauseating background color?
Do all users have different randomly selected fonts and point sizes and colors? Why does it change randomly without any user intervention? Is this some sort of a/b/.../z testing? Get it together, YouTube!
I most certainly didn't do anything to configure the closed captions like this. Are there keyboard commands so power users can quickly switch fonts to strange colors and point sizes, that my cats may have pressed when walking on my keyboard?
Some genius at YouTube decided to implement persistent keyboard shortcuts that enable cats to easily and stealthily change the closed captioned text into unreadable colors!
My cat can press "o" to make the text lighter and fuzzier, and press "b" to cycle through a garish series of primary background colors plus black and white, including the same color as the text, rendering it invisible. There may be others, but I can't tell and I'm afraid to try.
Hoping that my opposable thumbs would enable me to get some help, I pressed "?" expecting to get a list of keyboard shortcuts, but that didn't do anything but violate the Principle of Least Astonishment [2].
It's not all my cat's fault, though -- some of the blame lies with YouTube: purposefully designing, implementing and not documenting such annoyingly cat-friendly but unhelpfully user-hostile keyboard shortcuts.
Googling for "youtube keyboard shortcuts" doesn't show any links to official YouTube documentation on the first page of results -- the top featured hit is an outdated page from an "SEO Consultant" full of social networking widgets and ads and self promotion, that doesn't even mention the closed captioning related keyboard shortcuts, which my cat discovered all by himself.
Does YouTube itself even document its own keyboard shortcuts online anywhere, let alone providing pop-up "?" help?
And does anybody really think that changing the transparency and background color of closed captioned text is so important that it deserved several dedicated undocumented keyboard shortcuts, no matter what the usability consequences were? Or that the user's inadvertent color and transparency preferences should be persisted across all videos instead of applied per-video? Who would even want partially transparent text anyway, let alone a key to change between several transparencies?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
Please assume the other side possibly doesn't know something you know (if that's really the case here), instead of being rude and accusing them of spreading falsehoods.
That is frustratingly poor contrast.
Here is what mine look like http://imgur.com/HLIVXQ6
You can click settings again to change font sizes, font family, colors, etc.
However, software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write, and if you think there's a systematic issue, please file a bug, so it can help others in same situation.
The bug reports I've submitted to google have been ignored, and that's a frustrating distraction from what I'm paid to do. Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users.
FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to determine whether or not you've used their bug tracker in the past (or even filed a bug already for this specific issue).
When I find someone on a forum with a bug that I haven't heard about, I sit around and talk to them until they either get tired of wanting to talk to me or I get the information I need to fix the problem. The alternative would essentially translate to "I don't actually care about this bug", as that's the only way you are going to get certain classes of bug report. I have shown people at Apple bugs that they were absolutely fascinated by momentarily and then told "File a Radar". I clearly wasn't in a position to do at the moment and which of course I forgot to do it when I got home... they should know this happens, because this assuredly happens to almost every single person they tell that to (and no, "well, we do see a large number of bugs filed" is not evidence against "people you tell to file a bug using your arcane system, particularly if they have to do it days later, probably won't"), and yet even when a potentially rare and real and critical bug is shown to them in person (this was even at an event where the whole point was to work with customers on their issues), their response is easentially "engh, I don't care if this doesn't work unless it affects a ton of people". As someone who works in security, I'm going to assert "do you want vulnerabilities? because this attitude is how you get vulnerabilities": every bug is precious as it is a mistake in your mental model of the software, and who knows how far down the rabbit hole that mistake will take you.
Sure: I realize that the engineer isn't always the best person to do this, and even in my tiny company I had to solve that, but the solution isn't to tell people to "go use the bug tracker", a comment which shunts annoying work learning a new system, one which is all too likely to demoralize them (Apple's Radar is a great example of this), but instead to have someone whose job is to talk to people to follow up with credible bugs: I'd go "hey Xyz, there's a guy on this forum who's complaining about something I hadn't heard of before; can you try to get more details from them?" (where Xyz has changed over the years, but has always been one of the few key positions). I couldn't begin to count the number of times I have debugged an issue with someone on reddit.
If YouTube were open source, and I could look at the source code of the keyboard handler to find the cause of the problem myself, prove my bad experience was not just a falsehood to be brushed off, and possibly even suggest a fix, then maybe I would have been more motivated to put my own time into filing a bug report.
But Google is a huge well funded advertising company that payed billions of dollars for YouTube and makes billions of dollars off of it, has a huge complex system set up for digital rights management, promoting and paying for advertisements, enabling copyright holders to report violations, paying many employees for actively pursuing and resolving those copyright violations, removing inappropriate content, hiring conservative lobbyists and sending executives to kiss Donald Trump's ring [1], etc.
So I would expect YouTube employees to put at least as much time and effort into reporting bugs about their own product to their employer, as they put into monetizing YouTube while defending its reputation from people they perceive as spreading falsehoods about it.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-google-idUSKBN14...
I don't have access to file a bug through a work account for the next few days, and if you come across any issues (like CC broken by default), please file a bug with a lot of details. People do look at that stuff. I am glad that you found the source of the issue, and I hope you can agree that it would've been impossible to find it if I had just filed a bug. I do not work anywhere close to the team that implemented the CC, and when people have said "file a bug" to me in a work context, they have meant it as a way to "let's keep track of this so it's not forgotten". Luckily, the people I have met at work have been good about this. I do not speak for Google or anyone else there, just sharing my own personal experience.
It's a design and documentation bug, that needs to be addressed at a higher level by re-evaluating the decisions and justifications behind all the keyboard accelerators, removing the ones that nobody actually uses and that cause more problems than they solve (like making closed captioned text transparent and changing its colors), implementing full and immediate "?" keyboard help, and writing some online documentation.
So should I simply click "send feedback" on any random youtube video and write up my suggestions, as this page tells me to? [1] I've done that now, so let's see what happens.
Do you really sincerely think my suggestion will actually make it back to the designers through that channel and that changes will happen as a result? Is there a way for me to track it?
Or is there a better accountable bug tracking system that I can actually submit a real trackable bug into and watch the progress and see if it gets marked "will not fix", like https://bugs.chromium.org but for youtube? Do you have access to a better bug tracking system for youtube that's not public?
Luckily, at YT, I have not met anyone that said "file a bug report" and meant "fuck off". I have worked with some people in the past at a different company that have meant that, but not here. Usually it has meant "let's file a bug to not forget about it", this is just my experience, and I just wanted to share it. I am only speaking for myself, and others might have different experiences.