This is kinda like a restaurant removing their handicapped ramp because it's "not used often". Of course, that'd be illegal.
One nitpick, I would disagree that accessibility features will always be low usage. Many accessibility features have become ubiquitous and essential features of many products. And many people preferred such captions who did not identify as needing accessibility features.
They aren't going to change their behavior - this is how Google rolls and it works for Google. They only want popular, cool stuff - and catering to the disabled and less fortunate isn't popular or cool.
I doubt much can be done about this... Try to avoid their services, when possible? Don't give them money? Encourage others to avoid Google?
It's frustrating having no recourse.
While the former is certainly true, the latter is definitely not. It's literally in the mission statement.
In this case, kind of, Google does work pretty hard on accessibility features. No one else has workable live transcriptions, and android accessibility suite is seeing constant improvements.
Maybe they think their ML transcription has gotten to a point where the process can be automated and maintaining crowdsource captions is not worth it / has liability. Still I disagree with this move. Genuinely curious what the cost/benefit analysis is. Most countries demographics are skewing older, I think it's worth maintaining these systems just in case.
When they turn around and cut off a surely much less cost-heavy accessibility feature seemingly at random, to many users complaint, it is, in fact, surprising.
As far as recourse, it'd be a bit of a stretch to use the ADA here, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone tried a lawsuit in this instance: Google is cutting off handicapped users for almost no real cost to themselves.
Yes, that show includes a variety of UK English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, but... damn, it's bad.
It's just not a smart move.
and
it's too expensive to roll out your own personal solution and share it with other people who think like you(think global scale not acquaintance scale) without using big tech
There is a pretty fine line between cynicism (i.e. it's just marketing) and idealism (ethical companies will generate a higher level of support), but I wonder how far this goes before a lawsuit shuts it down.
It's not unreasonable to think pushing for an accessible OS makes the rest of it better as well.
It's not quite like removing a ramp. It's more like a city had a program of "we'll help pave and maintain the sidewalk in front of your business to be more accessible, and to add ramps to connect to your door, by request"; but then no businesses took them up on that offer by requesting ramp installation—so they stopped offering the program.
Youtube is essentially a Monopsony for monetized Internet video. So this will make many previously accessible channels inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Starting from August 2019, only uploaders can approve submissions, when previously other viewers or YouTube moderation could also publish. A lot of people seem to have forgotten this, and YouTube never really updated the UI/Help pages to reflect it.
I have to wonder if whichever analyst came up with those stats was aware of this but turning a blind eye, or simply never noticed.
This is statistical illiteracy that even smart people continuously use. It is absolutely wrong!
They should think twice about bringing this one back. There may be some extra burden on their end too with violation/sabotage contributions showing up to contend with as well.
There is no way automated captions can be anywhere near OK for that.
He currently has a community of volunteers supplying captions and has as a result an audience of Russians and other eastern europeans, who partly used to drive or work on these tanks, watching his channel. This is now made impossible thanks to google.
iOS seems to have a lot of accessibility features, and without impairments I still find them useful.
Captions are great, who wants to listen to crappy audio all the time when one can read 5x faster?
completely devoid of punctuation
and proper capitalization so that all the words
run together in an endless nonsense sentence also they're
useless because each word pops up on the
screen one a time very slowly in time with the audio
with arbitrary line breaks sounds useful but
it makes it impossible to read the captions and actually
watch the video because you're forced to keep
your eyes on the weirdly scrolling captions you
can't just read one line at a time like proper
captions and it never gets the hard to
hear words right you know the ones that
would benefit most from proper captions
---
Also, the machine-generated captions are completely devoid of punctuation and proper capitalization, so that all the words run together in an endless, nonsense sentence.
Also, they're useless because each word pops up on the screen one a time, very slowly (in time with the audio), with arbitrary line breaks. Sounds useful, but it makes it impossible to read the captions and actually watch the video because you're forced to keep your eyes on the weirdly scrolling captions--you can't just read one line at a time like proper captions.
And it never gets the hard-to-hear words right. You know, the ones that would benefit most from proper captions.
Creating real subtitles is as much a combination of art and skill and judgement and balance as editing the video itself.
A good subtitle allows you to quickly read ahead, and then move your eyes back to the video, back to the people speaking, so that you can watch them act out the line.
A good subtitle doesn't transcribe everything said word for word, but reduces spoken language to written language, and focuses on the gist of what's said.
A good subtitle for hearing-impaired viewers describe important sounds that happen off-screen, such as doors opening or closing, but skips non-important sounds, and sounds of things happening on-screen.
Good subtitles and CCs both have to be structured carefully so that they do not negatively impact the delivery of lines in the content. The biggest offender of this is comedy series as an improperly structured and timed CC or subtitle will ruin many jokes.
Another aspect of this is how they handle making it easy to digest multiple lines of dialogue. Good CCs and subtitles will either structure the dialogue such that a certain voice is always on top or bottom or alternatively will match colours to voices.
Similarly, in content that is visually busy or rapidly changing, good subtitles and CCs will stay out of the "busy" section of the screen and avoid using a colour or outline that would interfere with the readability based on the background of the scene.
They are different but with regards to what makes them good, they are basically the same.
And to add on to this, on just about everything but live feeds, they are produced and added to video more or less the same way.
Yes. The rules for how long to show a subtitle, and when to pop them in and out are the same, regardless of the actual text shown. Everyone can decide what characters-per-second limit works for them, but whatever you choose, it fundamentally alters everything else and restricts what text can actually go in the subtitle. Translated or not translated, sound cues or no sound cues.
And in any language, the machine-generated captions don't have punctuation. You also miss out on non-speech cues that a manual captioner will often add, like a note that there's music playing in the background, or that a loud crash happened off-screen, or simply that a person laughed.
> Machine captions can be scaled to caption the entirety of YouTube, something crowdsourcing could never accomplish.
They certainly don't scale the same way, but one of the entire purposes of crowdsourcing is that it scales better than trying to employ what will inevitably be a smaller number of people. I still think there's value there, at least until machine-generated captions are actually on par with a human. We're not there yet.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en
Creators can also add their own captions in multiple languages, but this relies on them working together with the community, which may not always be realistic.
I can imagine how invaluable it is for a deaf person, they must get used to assume every transcribed word has only a 60% probability of being right, and quickly infer an array of possible meanings through context. But the experience is not comparable to human-transcribed subtitles.