ok youtube just said “fuck you if youre deaf or hard of hearing or just want to watch a video in a different language”
https://twitter.com/LiamODellUK/status/1288869766980042752
and you know what the fucking bullshit is they’re replacing it with a ~6 months free of a subscription to a third party captions provider~ which of course you’d have to pay for after those 6 months are up and you KNOW random youtuber #9039 isn’t going to bother to keep paying for that either because they won’t have the money or they just won’t care. and youtube’s going to act like that’s a perfectly fine alternative that won’t result in the majority of the site suddenly going from “more or less accessible” to “Fuck You If You’re Disabled”
“citing low usage” are you fucking kidding me nearly every worthwhile video i watch uses community captions. sometimes they’re kind of janky cuz they were made by some 14 year old who thought it’d be funny to put their own irrelevant jokes and commentary in there but that wasn’t a reason to ditch the feature entirely when its so useful and important
i’m not even hard of hearing and i rely on them to watch videos in other languages…this is literally how people have been making english subs for japanese songs and the like for years and it was great because you didn’t have to reupload the videos yourself and take away views from the original creators. many creators don’t allow reprints of their work whatsoever so if they go through with this (which unfortunately they seem pretty deadset on because lololol moneyyyyyy) it’s entirely likely that there just won’t be a way to watch that content with captions
there’s a petition to keep community captions…i don’t know if it’ll really do anything since they’re already going ~oh but we have Paid Alternatives!~ but don’t just let this pass by this should be a huge deal but i’ve barely seen anyone talking about it (not that i expect people to talk about things of any particular importance on tumblr but it’s not even getting attention on twitter beyond that one thread and like 2 other posts)
so like. sign this and shit don’t let youtube just actively get rid of accessibility features without anyone caring (though i’d say probably use twitter if you want to actually get their attention i don’t think they’d look here) http://chng.it/LN9HRNmnkg
This is also going to have a negative affect on people who watch videos in a foreign language since a lot of the subtitles in a language different from the video are community done captions too. Imagine how much harder it’ll be to watch most videos on youtube if you stuggle with English and now none of them are going to have subtitles for you.
