producers and distributors provide closed captioning for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers, and these now apply to most US online platforms. Video material produced by anyone receiving government funding must be accompanied by closed captioning. UK captioning laws were updated to include video- on-demand content in 2017. There was a flurry of backlash against the YouTube community captioning shutdown from hearing-disability advocates and YouTubers, who see it as an important tool in a digital world that is uneven in terms of accessibility. The “community” side of YouTube’s “community
contributions” has become just as valuable to creators and to viewers – the crowd-sourcing aspect allowed for genuine collaboration on content. This was particularly the case in multi-language subtitling, with bilingual users subtitling content of their favourite influencers, bands (K-pop fans feature prominently) and educational content. Captioning is supplied by fans as a channel’s following grows. Captioning now is the responsibility of the YouTube publisher, and with AI taking over the captioning space, a lot of this is easily done. But will it be done? Will creators, companies, organisations and institutions, who were happy to toggle on the option for community captions, happily take the extra time to create their own? Some YouTubers are on such frantic schedules, even copying and pasting AI-generated text might be a workflow step too far. The bigger issue this YouTube change points to is how hard-of-hearing viewers are subject to the whims of tech companies and content makers. It’s perfectly accurate for YouTube to note that the users of the community caption service were very tiny. The platform received a letter asking it to keep the service running, signed by 500,000 people – that’s .03% of YouTube’s roughly two billion users. In an interview for the BBC (https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/newsbeat-54074573), mildly deaf journalist and campaigner Liam O’Dell responded to the YouTube changes and assessed the captioning
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