“Like, I didn't come to this Youtuber's video to be subjected to a random captioner's personal stand-up night.” “Jokes in the captions drive me up the damn wall,” reads the video’s top comment. Another faux pas: using the captions as a place to add jokey commentary. I’m talking a caption block that takes up half the video screen! You actually can’t see what you’re supposed to be seeing because it’s covered by words.” Deaf YouTuber Jessica Kellgren-Fozard has videos dedicated to explaining the etiquette around captioning. “The worst offender has been actual paragraphs written as captions. “A lot of us find that community contributions are not legible,” Poynter says. The audience-generated captions can be great, depending on the community-often, they are foreign-language translations.
YouTube gives you captioning options: If you don’t want to use the auto-generated ones, you can upload your own, or allow your viewers to write and upload their versions. Manual captioners likely wouldn’t make mistakes on par with zebra/concealer, but they’re not infallible either. Appreciative of the effort but unconvinced by the results, activists have dubbed them “craptions.”
YouTube’s captions are often garbled, because, unless YouTubers themselves intervene and manually type out the correct words, they’re auto-generated, the best efforts of a closed-captioning algorithm the company has been tweaking for years. In this bizarre and silent version of YouTube, people don’t ask you to “subscribe and turn on notifications.” They ask you to “subscribe and turn on other patients.” It’s dark.įor people who are deaf or hard of hearing, making sense of videos online can be deeply frustrating, even if the video is captioned, which is now the norm (if not the law) on most platforms. In a recent random sample, the common phrase “You’re on your own” was captioned “You won you’re wrong.” “Ethan has to leave” came out “ether nice to leave.” “Met” became “wet”-and “wedding,” somehow, “lady”-until finally the videos collapsed into unintelligibility. If you rely on YouTube’s captions, good luck. This story is part of a series on how we watch stuff-from the emotional tug of Facebook video series to the delight of Netflix randomness.
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