In the latest news of accessibility removal, YouTube announced that they will be removing community captions on September 28, 2020.
A screenshot of YouTube’s announcement to discontinue community contributions. Image description: An announcement from Youtube stating: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels after September 28, 2020. Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title/descriptions to videos. This feature was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse so we’re removing them to focus on other creator tools. You can still use your own captions, automatic captions, and third party tools and services. You have until September 28, 2020, to publish your community contributions before they’re removed.
YouTube began as a community site way back in 2005, and anyone who has been on the site and subscribes to a few channels can speak to the camaraderie that YouTube channels can create. Community contributions were one of the ways viewers could interact with content creators and help make the site more engaging for the audience (especially once YouTube discontinued video replies…). Captions are important to all kinds of viewers, including deaf/HOH viewers as well as international viewers. Often, the only way for content creators to have access to captions in other languages was through community contributions.
On their help page, YouTube states that creators can still use “[their] own captions, automatic captions, or third-party tools and services,” none of which are really a good replacement for the niche that community contributions served the site. Many content creators do not have the time or money to write their own captions, especially as their viewer base gets bigger or as they create more complicated content. Even further, many disabled content creators are not able to add captions to their videos either. Beyond this, community captions are a way for content creators to access captioning services at no cost, through the volunteer services of their viewership, which cuts the cost of using a third-party service. Finally, anyone who has ever used YouTube’s “automatic captions” feature knows how unreliable it really is! Why not allow users to continue to enter accurate closed captions for videos that serve the viewers better than the automatically generated garbage that the algorithm provides?
YouTube states that the community contributions feature “was rarely used” and “had problems with spam/abuse” as their reasons for discontinuing the service. While I can’t speak for the second point, I have to strongly disagree with the first – many of my favorite creators rely on community contributions for their captions, and I’ve even contributed to a few videos myself. Many popular YouTubers have their videos captioned in multiple languages to reach a wider fanbase – captions added by those international fans themselves.
There is still hope – while the feature will be removed on September 28th, existing captions and captions added up until that date will still be available. Both XDA and TNW also report that YouTube will be providing a 6-month subscription to the captioning service Amara as well as obtaining special pricing and benefits from the aforementioned third-party vendors. However, these temporary solutions will not fill the void that will remain from the loss of community contributions. People across the internet continue to voice their dissent for the company decision, even creating a change.org petition to bring community captions back, but it appears that the decision is final.
In the meantime, I hope that viewers will continue to add captions through the community feature for as long as they can and that all users of YouTube will continue to be critical about decisions that affect user accessibility and content creation. I imagine that this will only strengthen our community bonds across the platform as we come up with new and creative ways to make content accessible for everyone.
