WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: - Accessibility a external content

for

From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Mar 30, 2022 4:24PM

Christopher,

I too have had little success with reaching out to the owners of other YouTube channels for the same goals.

In my ideal accessibility world, once professional captions had been made for a video hosted on YouTube there should be a mechanism to get those associated with the video. I can see no good reason why captions done by 3Play Media, AST or others of that caliber would not then get linked so that all subsequent viewers of that video could have a more accessible experience.

My attempts to have that conversation with 3Play Media got a reply at Accessing Higher Ground along the lines of "YouTube wants to honor the artistic blah, blah, blah of their users integrity, more blah, blah, blah."

So I tried to find a real human associated with YouTube accessibility, which was like finding a unicorn. And again through a few channels suggested this idea of having some means of telling a channel owner, "Hi. Professional closed captions have been created for your video. Would you like to toggle those as the default? There is no charge to you and this will lead to a more accessible experience for your viewers and it will aid search engines in finding your content." The person I reached at YouTube through a computer scientist he knows got no interest in pursuing this.

Instead we in higher education and elsewhere probably pay to caption the same videos on other people's channels again and again and play those through skins to give our users access, the caption firms make more money, and the YouTube accessibility experience is not as good as it could be.

I'll step off of my soapbox for now but haven't given up on this idea.

Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632