IMPORTANT - Regarding Community Captions on Youtube Videos

[buskerdog]

http://chng.it/xj5LHDZMV5

Youtube have announced that in September they plan to remove the community captions feature from their site; which is a feature that allows viewers to submit their own captions for videos. Their reasoning for such a change is because "not enough people use them", which is ENTIRELY UNTRUE, these captions are important for deaf/hard of hearing people to watch videos and are also important for allowing people to enjoy content in different languages - which, within the particular context of the touhou community, could mean we lose translation captions for doujin music, animations, and other content.

Now unfortunately because Youtube are so tone deaf, we really need as much support as possible if we want a chance to stop this change. Even if you do not use captions for anything, the main reason I make this post is to try and reach as many people as possible who might not have heard about this otherwise. So, if you are seeing this, please do any/as many of the following things as you can to try and help the message be heard:

1: Sign this petition: http://chng.it/xj5LHDZMV5

2: Comment on Youtube's own "creator insider" channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7-s5rAWygI

3: Tweet at Youtube on Twitter

4: If you have your own Youtube channel, you can send feedback messages to Youtube. You can do this via the "Send feedback" button, which you can find in the bottom left corner of your Youtube Studio page.

Commenting on this thread could also help other people on this site see it!

 

[Ken Hisuag]

Thanks for bringing attention to this. I really wish Youtube would stop "fixing" features everyone's happy with.

 

[Drunken_Flower]

okay lemme elaborate a bit

The CC will not be removed, the community submission is the one that removed, and any community submission that has already added will stay.
so basically you can't add translation yourself, only the one with permission can add captions.
also the Caption tool, will be removed, so you can't do fancy subtitles anymore (you still can, but using 3rd party services (most likely not free))

 

[Ken Hisuag]

So new captions can still be added, but it has to go through the uploader?

If that's the case, the situation isn't as bad, but I still question why the change was deemed necessary.

 

[Mizuiro]

Man... It's like when they removed annotations, first, I can't read that LoLK EX commentary, now what? Can't contribute to translation for fanworks?

Whyyyy

 

[Rorogogo]

So new captions can still be added, but it has to go through the uploader?

If that's the case, the situation isn't as bad, but I still question why the change was deemed necessary.

I believe that system was the system that was in place before. This system will simply remove the feature of community captioning entirely. The only people who will have non auto-generated captions after this change are people who added them and created the video (creators adding captions) or videos that already had community captions on this. Hope I helped. I'm greatly disturbed by this because I love the using this feature as many of the Touhou Manzais, skits, and other general videos (K-pop, J-pop, other language songs,  YTP's VA shifting, Gameplay commentators, etc.) rely and use this feature for those who might not speak the language or require them for attention needs, personal preferences, or legit just being deaf. It's honestly a terrible suggestion, and we should try to speak up about this.