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What's incredibly insane here, is that "low usage" is the excuse being used to terminate an accessibility feature. Accessibility features will always be low usa

What's incredibly insane here, is that "low usage" is the excuse being used to terminate an accessibility feature. Accessibility features will always be low usage, but it's still important to provide them. This is kinda like a restaurant removing their handicapped ramp because it's "not used often". Of course, that'd be illegal.

jxramos 6y ago
Yah, this is really poor. I know they have the auto-generated form, but it's far from 100% and a lot of words have a lot of domain specific nuance that it takes a person in that field to disambiguate. 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.
- roywashere 6y ago
  My favorite youtube channel is a Dutch guy who bought an old Russian tank and is getting it in working condition. He talks Dutch, with an accent, from his loud workshop, and uses all the right vocabulary for the things he is working on. This means, he is using a lot more than the most common 300 or so words. 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.
  - alickz 6y ago
    Sounds interesting, do you have a link to their channel?
    - asymptotically2 6y ago
      Sounds like MasterMilo! https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82 https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82
      - alickz 6y ago
        Thanks!
  - jxramos 6y ago
    I was thinking too about another poor experience from auto captions. They're one long run on sentence. They have no sense of punctuation. Sometimes it makes comprehending what's being communicated pretty scrambled at times because the borders between statements and concepts can be blurred and you have to backtrack at times to follow what was being said and what word belongs to which sentence.
ancarda 6y ago
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.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  > 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.
  - thombat 6y ago
    Maybe enacting your mission statement is no longer popular nor cool?
    - behringer 6y ago
      Google ignored their mission statement before. Why not again?
- dirtyid 6y ago
  > 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.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
derefr 6y ago
I think Google might mean that the community wasn't actually taking advantage of the feature to provide very many subtitles (i.e. low supply); not that there weren't many people using such subtitles when available. 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.
- idnefju 6y ago
  Still follows the same logic, why should it be removed for the minority if the majority abuses it?
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    Because the code still has to be actively maintained perpetually - internal APIs change over time, security risks have to be mitigated, some one (or some teams) have to have responsibility over this feature - and Google has decided it's not moving the needle enough to be worth it.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      ADA doesn't care about their ROI on features
      - sangnoir 6y ago
        You are right, but ADA doesn't apply in this specific case.
        paulryanrogers 6y ago
        While technically true in this age of social distancing and increasingly online everything it probably should. 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.
strawberrypuree 6y ago
This is why I have high respect for Apple, which routine ships new accessibility features and maintains them, despite them being very low usage. A few of those features end up becoming handy for non-accessibility users, like the ability to make your screen black and white on the iPhone or the ability to detect sounds.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  Tim Cook has famously told investors to fuck off (in slightly more polite language) for questioning the ROI of accessibility features.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Can you give me one example of this?
    - lathiat 6y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/#1f6a711955f2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
    - mthoms 6y ago
      The quote is "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." https://www.imore.com/apple-accessibility-human-right https://www.imore.com/apple-accessibility-human-right
      - ultrarunner 6y ago
        I wonder (seriously) what the ROI on a statement like this might be. Is there a level where "responsibility to the shareholders" is sampled, or could it be a few layers of indirection away? 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.
shirakawasuna 6y ago
This is the clearest and most detrimental aspect of shutting this down. So many blind and/or deaf YouTube visitors depend on user-generated captioning. 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.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
- imglorp 6y ago
  One of those non-accessibility options is learning a language. Turning on captions is so useful.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > identify as needing accessibility features Has this also become an identity thing now? Whether you need it or not is a matter of self-identification?
  - danielheath 6y ago
    My hearing is fine; I prefer captions because I often have unavoidable background noise and can’t turn the volume up without disturbing others.
  - blendergeek 6y ago
    > ... become and identity thing ... Slow. Down. Not everything is identity politics. I think GP is speaking of those who signal a _need_ for accessibility features. These people would 'identify as needing accessibility features'. Others do not _need_ such features and therefore do not signal such. These people may still appreciate them on occasion. I for one, definitely would not claim to need closed captions, yet, if subtitles are available I may well use them. I might use them if my speakers are broken or if my roommate is asleep and I left my headphones in my car.
throwawaynothx 6y ago
They are not removing captioning. so its not comparable
howlgarnish 6y ago
YouTube has automatic captioning though, which scales way better and does not suffer from the spam/vandalism problems of user generated captions. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en 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.
- leppr 6y ago
  Youtube automatic transcriptions may be state-of-the-art technology, but from the perspective of a human consummer they're still extremely poor quality. I like to put on captions in my second language, and the automatic captions are basically just annoying UI spam. 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.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  Very often auto captioning doesn't even detect the right language and then proceed to try match phonemes from the original language into words of the caption language.
vinniejames 6y ago
This was removed because the machine generated captions have reached near parity with crowdsourced captions. Machine captions can be scaled to caption the entirety of YouTube, something crowdsourcing could never accomplish.
- wruza 6y ago
  As a non-english speaker (writer actually, since I cannot fluently speak) who routinely watches popsci/math/etc videos on youtube, I assure you that machine-generated subtitles are completely useless. It may "parse" the usual speech, but not specific terms, and when it fails often (it does), a text becomes a mess. By disabling user-generated content they basically pin everyone with hearing issues to funny cat videos and amazing pop star interviews. I don't think they can scale beyond that right now.
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    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 --- 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.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
samnwa 6y ago
They will still have captions, just not crowdsourced. The auto captions are better and better these days.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  The auto caption doesn't even detect the right language in many cases, doesn't have all languages, and is often comically bad. Maybe it's good for English but don't trust it for other languages.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Its also frequently pretty bad for english
  - brnt 6y ago
    On top if that, for multi lingual audio it is precisely useless, while multilingual audio is the norm in many countries or regions, as foreign sources are used as is rather than dubbed.
marmaduke 6y ago
> Accessibility features will always be low usage 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?
brnt 6y ago
This argument is my pet pieve. Whether it's about companies, governments, statistics, public debate: when you're dealing with large numbers of users/clients/citizens, a percent is still going to be a giant number of people! New Yorks population is also under a percent of the US total but were not shutting down any service over it! Large groups have large numbers of outliers! We support the blind and people in wheelchairs not because they're numerous enough, but because we care about including them. This is statistical illiteracy that even smart people continuously use. It is absolutely wrong!
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Given that many industries and governmental agencies are required to have accessible content it follows that if they do not move off of YouTube to a solution that provides the accessibility features they would be open to being sued. (obviously this is more relevant in regions where accessibility is more mandated by law and has appropriate fines for non compliance)
- csunbird 6y ago
  I think Youtube is only killing the community provided (a.k.a. anyone) subtitles, but the video owners can provide their own subtitles. If there is a risk for you to be sued for not providing captions, you would provide your own anyways.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Hmm yeah I overreacted, but will YouTube still provide the subtitle adding ability in YouTube studio - or will one have to add the subtitles externally?
    - xbmcuser 6y ago
      they are removing the community submission part not subtitles.
themadprogramer 6y ago
There is actually a very good reason for the "low usage" rates, YouTube made the publishing of closed captions a lot more difficult a year ago: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1167565334917742593 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1167565334917742593 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.

jxramos 6y ago

Yah, this is really poor. I know they have the auto-generated form, but it's far from 100% and a lot of words have a lot of domain specific nuance that it takes a person in that field to disambiguate. 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.

roywashere 6y ago
My favorite youtube channel is a Dutch guy who bought an old Russian tank and is getting it in working condition. He talks Dutch, with an accent, from his loud workshop, and uses all the right vocabulary for the things he is working on. This means, he is using a lot more than the most common 300 or so words. 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.
- alickz 6y ago
  Sounds interesting, do you have a link to their channel?
  - asymptotically2 6y ago
    Sounds like MasterMilo! https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82 https://www.youtube.com/user/mastermilo82
    - alickz 6y ago
      Thanks!
- jxramos 6y ago
  I was thinking too about another poor experience from auto captions. They're one long run on sentence. They have no sense of punctuation. Sometimes it makes comprehending what's being communicated pretty scrambled at times because the borders between statements and concepts can be blurred and you have to backtrack at times to follow what was being said and what word belongs to which sentence.

ancarda 6y ago

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.

throwaways885 6y ago
> 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.
- thombat 6y ago
  Maybe enacting your mission statement is no longer popular nor cool?
  - behringer 6y ago
    Google ignored their mission statement before. Why not again?
dirtyid 6y ago
> 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.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

I think Google might mean that the community wasn't actually taking advantage of the feature to provide very many subtitles (i.e. low supply); not that there weren't many people using such subtitles when available. 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.

idnefju 6y ago
Still follows the same logic, why should it be removed for the minority if the majority abuses it?
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Because the code still has to be actively maintained perpetually - internal APIs change over time, security risks have to be mitigated, some one (or some teams) have to have responsibility over this feature - and Google has decided it's not moving the needle enough to be worth it.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    ADA doesn't care about their ROI on features
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      You are right, but ADA doesn't apply in this specific case.
      - paulryanrogers 6y ago
        While technically true in this age of social distancing and increasingly online everything it probably should. 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.

strawberrypuree 6y ago

This is why I have high respect for Apple, which routine ships new accessibility features and maintains them, despite them being very low usage. A few of those features end up becoming handy for non-accessibility users, like the ability to make your screen black and white on the iPhone or the ability to detect sounds.

snuxoll 6y ago
Tim Cook has famously told investors to fuck off (in slightly more polite language) for questioning the ROI of accessibility features.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Can you give me one example of this?
  - lathiat 6y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/#1f6a711955f2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
  - mthoms 6y ago
    The quote is "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." https://www.imore.com/apple-accessibility-human-right https://www.imore.com/apple-accessibility-human-right
    - ultrarunner 6y ago
      I wonder (seriously) what the ROI on a statement like this might be. Is there a level where "responsibility to the shareholders" is sampled, or could it be a few layers of indirection away? 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.

shirakawasuna 6y ago

This is the clearest and most detrimental aspect of shutting this down. So many blind and/or deaf YouTube visitors depend on user-generated captioning. 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.

chaostheory 6y ago
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
imglorp 6y ago
One of those non-accessibility options is learning a language. Turning on captions is so useful.
bonoboTP 6y ago
> identify as needing accessibility features Has this also become an identity thing now? Whether you need it or not is a matter of self-identification?
- danielheath 6y ago
  My hearing is fine; I prefer captions because I often have unavoidable background noise and can’t turn the volume up without disturbing others.
- blendergeek 6y ago
  > ... become and identity thing ... Slow. Down. Not everything is identity politics. I think GP is speaking of those who signal a _need_ for accessibility features. These people would 'identify as needing accessibility features'. Others do not _need_ such features and therefore do not signal such. These people may still appreciate them on occasion. I for one, definitely would not claim to need closed captions, yet, if subtitles are available I may well use them. I might use them if my speakers are broken or if my roommate is asleep and I left my headphones in my car.

throwawaynothx 6y ago

They are not removing captioning. so its not comparable

howlgarnish 6y ago

YouTube has automatic captioning though, which scales way better and does not suffer from the spam/vandalism problems of user generated captions. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en 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.

leppr 6y ago
Youtube automatic transcriptions may be state-of-the-art technology, but from the perspective of a human consummer they're still extremely poor quality. I like to put on captions in my second language, and the automatic captions are basically just annoying UI spam. 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.
jobigoud 6y ago
Very often auto captioning doesn't even detect the right language and then proceed to try match phonemes from the original language into words of the caption language.

vinniejames 6y ago

This was removed because the machine generated captions have reached near parity with crowdsourced captions. Machine captions can be scaled to caption the entirety of YouTube, something crowdsourcing could never accomplish.

wruza 6y ago
As a non-english speaker (writer actually, since I cannot fluently speak) who routinely watches popsci/math/etc videos on youtube, I assure you that machine-generated subtitles are completely useless. It may "parse" the usual speech, but not specific terms, and when it fails often (it does), a text becomes a mess. By disabling user-generated content they basically pin everyone with hearing issues to funny cat videos and amazing pop star interviews. I don't think they can scale beyond that right now.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  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 --- 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.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago

samnwa 6y ago

They will still have captions, just not crowdsourced. The auto captions are better and better these days.

jobigoud 6y ago
The auto caption doesn't even detect the right language in many cases, doesn't have all languages, and is often comically bad. Maybe it's good for English but don't trust it for other languages.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Its also frequently pretty bad for english
- brnt 6y ago
  On top if that, for multi lingual audio it is precisely useless, while multilingual audio is the norm in many countries or regions, as foreign sources are used as is rather than dubbed.

marmaduke 6y ago

> Accessibility features will always be low usage 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?

brnt 6y ago

This argument is my pet pieve. Whether it's about companies, governments, statistics, public debate: when you're dealing with large numbers of users/clients/citizens, a percent is still going to be a giant number of people! New Yorks population is also under a percent of the US total but were not shutting down any service over it! Large groups have large numbers of outliers! We support the blind and people in wheelchairs not because they're numerous enough, but because we care about including them. This is statistical illiteracy that even smart people continuously use. It is absolutely wrong!

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

Given that many industries and governmental agencies are required to have accessible content it follows that if they do not move off of YouTube to a solution that provides the accessibility features they would be open to being sued. (obviously this is more relevant in regions where accessibility is more mandated by law and has appropriate fines for non compliance)

csunbird 6y ago
I think Youtube is only killing the community provided (a.k.a. anyone) subtitles, but the video owners can provide their own subtitles. If there is a risk for you to be sued for not providing captions, you would provide your own anyways.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Hmm yeah I overreacted, but will YouTube still provide the subtitle adding ability in YouTube studio - or will one have to add the subtitles externally?
  - xbmcuser 6y ago
    they are removing the community submission part not subtitles.

themadprogramer 6y ago

There is actually a very good reason for the "low usage" rates, YouTube made the publishing of closed captions a lot more difficult a year ago: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1167565334917742593 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1167565334917742593 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.