Youtube’s “Big Bad Bubby” UX bug!

This is a short summary of what appears to be a huge bug on Youtube that makes it almost impossible to use Youtube effectively if you are a Deaf or hard of hearing user (or someone who speaks a language other than English) and you are reliant upon good quality captioning for accessibility and inclusion.

What is the bug?

Usually when you look at the videos on a Youtube channel you can see where captions have been published, as they’re denoted by a small “cc” icon.

But lately I’ve noticed a large amount of Youtube videos that have published caption tracks which are available to users but they’ve not been rewarded with the “cc” logo.

This makes it impossible for users to rely on this information.

An example

This Youtube video (i.e. the 4th one on the first row about his “no jab, no pay” vaccination initiative) that has recently been uploaded onto the Australian Prime Minister’s Youtube channel.

Screenshot 1 shows 4 videos with the “cc” icon on the video page

Screenshot 2 — showing that this video does indeed have good quality captions! But there’s no way a user can know this when reviewing a channel’s video page.

What about using videos.google.com instead ?

No can do!

Using the Prime Minister’s “no jab, no pay” video as an example, if we navigate to Google’s own video search engine at videos.google.com and then filter our search for videos that only have closed captions it seems that Youtube and Google and their army of “web robots” have simply no idea that this video has been properly captioned!

Screenshot 3 — using Google’s on video search engine at: videos.google.com to search for the terms, +tony +abbott +no +jab

Screenshot 4 — the “no jab, no pay” video appears in the results at No.2 but this is for all videos, not just those that have closed captions.

Screenshot 5 — filtering the results for only “closed captioned” videos will result in screenshot 6

Screenshot 6 — now you see it, and now you don’t! Where’s the “no jab, no pay” video gone? We know it has captions, so why doesn’t Google’s on search engine?

What a shocking bug! It’s already hard enough to try and encourage Youtube content uploaders to ensure their content is captioned and if they don’t receive the “CC” icon (badge) that’s yet another barrier that can hinder accessibility outcomes.

Please Google and Youtube — show some heart and rectify this issue as quickly as possible.