ast summer, YouTube cancelled its community captioning feature. The platform’s community contributions option allowed people posting videos to invite fellow YouTubers to submit video subtitles and closed captions, as well as titles and descriptions. Community contributions also meant that captions and subtitles could be submitted in multiple languages. These could then be reviewed, edited and ultimately published by the channel owner. YouTube still allows users to insert their own captions or use the platform’s AI-powered automatic captioning service, or other third- party tools, such as 3Play Media, Amara, cielo24 and Rev. YouTube explained the removal of community captioning with: “This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we’re removing them to focus on other creator tools.” But deaf and hearing-impaired creators were nonplussed. Hard of hearing Twitter user @_CodeNameT1M said: “Wait, are you f *cking for real now? It’s unbelievable, most of the Videos I watch have subtitles which were community driven. This is not okay...” Closed captioning or subtitling for video is mandated by law in some countries for traditional broadcast (practically speaking, captioning and subtitling mean virtually the same thing – although, technically, captioning is aimed at viewers who can’t hear the audio, and so may include indication of sound effects and music, too). In the US, the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] has long maintained regulations requiring US broadcasters,
Good subtitling is essential for enjoying your newfound K-drama obsession, or getting up to speed on that French comedy series. But for some people, it’s indispensible for accessing any content at all
@feedzinesocial
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