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Re: - Accessibility a external content

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Mar 30, 2022 9:01PM

Doug wrote:
Quote: ... the caption firms make more money ... End Quote.

And so does YouTube and everyone else in the food chain — Except those of us mandated to meet accessibility and education laws.

The crux of the problem: now that most of our industry is owned by private investment firms, their main question is how can I make more money out of this? Doing something good for society or because it helps the majority with little cost, isn't on their radar.

Our little industry is now viewed as a commodity to be exploited.

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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Hayman, Douglass
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 6:24 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] [EXTERNAL] - Re: Accessibility a external content

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