Deaf News: Outcry after YouTube scrap community captions feature

The video sharing site YouTube is to axe community contributions for subtitles and translations next month, it has been confirmed.

The tool, which allows viewers to submit captions for a channel’s video to creators, will be retired on 28 September.

In a Help Centre article about community captions, YouTube said: “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.”

Their decision comes after the YouTube channel Creator Insider, which is managed by the platform’s tech team, announced in April that they were considering deprecating the feature.

“The reason that we’re considering it ultimately comes down to not that many creators are ultimately using it,” said Product Manager James Dillard.

In a Community post about the move, YouTube said: “Less than 0.001% of channels [have] published community captions (showing on less than 0.2% of watch time) in the last month. Instead, creators are using YouTube’s alternative captioning tools.

“No other captioning tools are going away beyond Community Contributions. You can still add your own captions and subtitles, or use YouTube’s built-in automatic captioning feature.

“If you have contributions currently saved as drafts, these will be available for the next 60 days (until Sept 28 2020), and you have until then to publish them before they’re removed.”

The post goes on to add that automatic and manual captions will remain on the platform, as will community contributions already published by creators.

It continues: “We know many of you rely on community captions and thanks to the feedback we received, YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days.

“These creators will receive a notification on their YouTube Studio Dashboard (News Card) in the coming weeks with more information about how to sign up for the service.”

YouTube has since gone on to stress that they are “not monetising any transactions that occur” when it comes to subscriptions to the third-party captioning service.

In a follow-up video on community captions, released on Creator Insider, James also discussed plans for a new captions editor, as well as a new permissions setting for others to submit captions to a channel.

“We would like to add a permissions role – an access level – that only allows someone to edit your captions or translated tracks.

“I think, in a lot of ways, this gives the best of the community captions experience. I know that there are some channels out there that will say, ‘listen, people just found me and that was really great, but a lot of the risk comes there as well’.

“When you as a creator can control who has the ability to do that, it allows you to make sure that the quality matches what you want for your channel.

“If they’re not meeting your bar of quality, you can kick them out – hopefully that doesn’t happen all that often,” he said.

However, the decision has been met with criticism from the YouTube community, including deaf and disabled creators.

Rikki Poynter, a deaf campaigner who launched #NoMoreCRAPtions in response to the quality of automatic captions on the platform, tweeted: “I told [YouTube] for a full freakin’ hour why we need community contribution.

“Not just for deaf people so more channels will have captions, but for disabled creators who can’t manually do them or have the income to pay for them: which is most of us. They do not care about us.”

I told them for a full freakin' hour why we need community contribution. Not just for deaf people so more channels will have captions, but for disabled creators who can't manually do them or have the income to pay for them: which is most of us. They do not care about us.

— Rikki Poynter (@rikkipoynter) July 31, 2020

Meanwhile, deaf British YouTuber Jessica Kellgren-Fozard wrote that she is “really sad” to see the feature being scrapped by the platform.

“The tool helped me a lot when I was a small creator and I will always be grateful to my audience who put in work to caption in so many different languages.

“I’ve spoken to YouTube about the change and they told me that community contributions were being abused and used to bully both creators and audiences, which I’ve seen myself.

“I feel like completely turning off the function is an overreaction though,” she said.

A Change.org petition calling for YouTube to reverse its decision has been set up in response, which currently has more than 360,000 signatures at the time of writing.

Responding to a request for comment about the online petition, a YouTube spokesperson said they are “always listening to feedback” from creators and members of the community, adding that they are taking it into account “as we plan the future captioning features” on the platform.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.