Deaf News: YouTube confirms removal of community captions feature

Community captions, which allowed viewers to submit subtitles and translations to a YouTube channel, will be scrapped as planned at the end of September – despite facing a backlash from the deaf community.

A Change petition gained over 500k signatures and the hashtag #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs trended on Twitter after YouTube first confirmed details at the end of July.

In a video on the Creator Insider channel responding to these concerns, YouTube’s Ariel Bardin listed three tools designed to “drive more captions” – including an integration into the upload flow, improvements to the captions editor, and a new permissions role.

“Hopefully, between these three changes that will be coming in the next month, we’ll be able to really drive up the number of videos with captions, and of course not down.

“If it turns out that we made a mistake with this decision, then we will look at that decision again, and figure out what we can do.

“By not spending time on rebuilding the community captions functionality onto the new system, we can have more cycles to do other things,” he said.

The confirmation comes as YouTube faces criticism for its new default setting for automatic captions, which sees “potentially inappropriate” words replaced with ‘[__]’.

Commenting on the new tool in a post on Instagram, Deaf YouTuber and campaigner Rikki Poynter said: “The words are already being said out loud, censoring the words is infantilizing deaf people, especially adults.

“We know what is being said. We can see it on the lips.

“Censoring it is treating us like children.”

The rollout of the feature follows reports from creators and viewers of the n-word appearing in the automatically generated subtitles, when the word was not said in the video.

In an article explaining the tool, a Google employee writes: “Because our automatic captions can make mistakes, we want to be extra careful not to caption certain words incorrectly.

“So to better avoid these mistakes, viewers will now see “[ __ ]” appear instead of a potentially inappropriate word (when auto-generated subtitles/closed captions are turned on during playback).”

They went on to add that this is the default setting for automatic captions, which can be turned off and does not apply to manual captions.

More information about YouTube captions can be found on the Help Center.

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.