YouTube’s automatic craptioning*
This remains one of the biggest accessibility issues facing the web today but unfortunately there’s very little awareness about it.
Basically, the problem is that YouTube’s automatic craptions* provide no real accessibility benefits to end users who rely on good quality and accurate captioning to watch video content.
It’s also my belief that the recent legal cases in Europe that have led to Google undertaking to remove negative content from its web search results in response to specific takedown requests from users, highlights that there is also real potential for poor automatic captioning to lead to future legal claims against YouTube and / or its content producers for defamation and / or slander if they fail to take any remedial action on their use of automatic captions.
To illustrate the issue, I have linked to a YouTube video that Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, released earlier today that details his trip to visit Indonesia’s new President, Joko Widodo.
My challenge to everybody reading this post is to turn the sound off completely and watch this YouTube video with the automatic craptions* turned on to fully understand my experience as a profoundly Deaf man before reading on…
So, how did you go? It was pretty much atrocious all the way through wasn’t it? At least you can surely understand now that I rarely watch a YouTube video from start to finish if it only has automatic craptions* available?
To make things worse, this is a YouTube video with a single speaker who has a clear voice and a strong vocal delivery. It also seems to have good quality audio and there are no apparent issues with background noise which can further negate YouTube’s voice recognition processes.
i.e. So all in all what we got here… are supposedly ideal operating conditions for YouTube’s automatic captioning.
So let’s have a look through all of the numerous errors in more detail.
For readers who are not based in Australia or Indonesia, they may not be aware that there has been quite a bit of friction between the two countries over the past 2–3 years, particularly in relation to the current Government’s approach to “stopping the boats” (aka people smuggling) and the former Government’s cancellation of a sizeable chunk of the live cattle export market to Indonesia.
It certainly does not bode well for future diplomatic relations when the automatic craptions refer to the soon to be inaugurated Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, as the “Joker Widow”, “Jacobo E Now” and also as simply the “Joke”.
Surely this is slanderous? Or doesn’t it count because it’s only seen by a few hardy Deaf and hard of hearing users? I’m no lawyer and cannot even claim to be a “backyard lawyer” but it seems very clear to me that this is defamatory content that has been distributed by the Australian Government in the public domain via the Prime Minister’s YouTube channel.
Then there are other examples that simply state the exact opposite of the messaging that I’m sure the Prime Minister and the Australian government would be attempting to convey.
For example, rather than hearing that Australia is treating our relationship with Indonesia as a fundamental one that is extremely important — instead I see the automatic craptioning stating that “…Indonesia is a hugely important neither” and that this is a relationship “…with our most important neither”.
It’s all very, very confusing indeed!
Postscript:
Automatic Craptioning is a definition that I’ve coined to describe the poor quality automatic captioning that is provided by content producers using Google’s YouTube platform and which has not been subject to any further edits or revisions to improve their quality or accuracy.
In other words, they’re #@$!
