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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's really shitty behavior, but are you surprised? YouTube is owned by Google, a company that routinely culls features or products not used by at-least a billion people a day.

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.

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It's surprising because Google loves to use handicapped and disabled users as example cases of how important their technologies are. One of the most prominent early videos for the self-driving car project hinged on the idea that it would let a blind person go to a drive-thru at a restaurant.

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.

Or is that that their AI/ML is good enough that they don't need to crowd source captioning now?

No way it handles all languages with the same effectiveness.

Hell, it even sucks at accented English. A friend turned me onto the UK series Taskmaster, which is available on YouTube. I turn on captions/subtitles as a matter of habit, and the auto-generated captions for that show are atrocious.

Yes, that show includes a variety of UK English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, but... damn, it's bad.

A lot of accents, but still all native accents from the same few islands. Speech is such a vast field.

Not to mention how many non-native speakers there are making English language videos out there, many educational videos too.

It's just not a smart move.

No, it sucks.

Based on what I've seen, it can't even cope with simple plain English - in a video I watched earlier, in just the first 90 seconds, "This subject has" -> "If his subject has", "A weapon that was" -> "Her weapon fat was", "spherical shape" -> "severe achill shape".

A part of me hopes they never quite crack it, so I can keep having a laugh at some of the subtitles generated for UK regional accents

Whenever I don't understand something, I used to skip back and turn CCs on - this works fine if they were made by a human. It never works when they're automatically generated; if I can't understand it, there's a 100 % chance the automatic captions are garbage, and even if I can easily understand it, the automatic captions are still wrong like 80 % of the time.

Even if that was so, it's a bit like saying that blind won't need braille because there's text-to-speech. And English isn't the only language on youtube

it's funny how big tech has become like big government- there is no recourse to your personal complaints even if it's shared by a large number of people

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

What popular ‘cool’ things are from Google these days? I can only think of the decade(s) old Search (the money making part bought), Maps (bought), Mail, Youtube (bought), maybe Android (bought). Is there another ‘cool’ billion+ used one? Anything even semi-recent?

(No insider information, but) I suspect Drive, Photos, Assistant are all 1B+. Most of the new stuff from Google is features on existing products (which cover such broad markets that it's almost pointless launching major stuff as often).

Are those a billion plus by choice or by being preinstalled on Android? If by default the photos you take on an Android end up in Photos, everyone who has Photos in Photos is hardly a voluntary Photos user.

> They only want popular, cool stuff - and catering to the disabled and less fortunate isn't popular or cool.

While the former is certainly true, the latter is definitely not. It's literally in the mission statement.

Maybe enacting your mission statement is no longer popular nor cool?

Google ignored their mission statement before. Why not again?

> surprised

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.

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