Deaf and hard of hearing people get routinely left out of the public sphere because people excuse themselves from their obligation to provide accessibly. People say “I wouldn’t make this if I had to caption it.”
In reality, captioning isn’t that hard. Very few people are willing to go to the trouble of uploading a video but won’t caption it.
> because people excuse themselves from their obligation to provide accessibly
What obligation? They're not even obligated to put the video up; it's just a gesture of public service. Giving people the obligation to put captions when they upload videos for free consumption is like giving a beggar part of your lunch out of generosity and he complaining that he likes his sandwiches with more cheese.
Not to specifically liken the deaf and hard of hearing to beggars, since all YouTube viewers are beggars in my analogy. However, the point I'm getting at is that when someone does you a favor like upload a video for free for your consumption you should generally be grateful and do what you can with it, not complain and demand more. It's just not the right attitude.
It's like FOSS. You can ask the developer for more, but not demand it.
I think if we want more captions from videos submitted without remuneration, it's gonna need to be automated. Have the machine do the work. I think YouTube already does this, now that I think about it.
EDIT: Added some more on the analogy in case people thought I had something against deaf people.
A better analogy would be offering your sandwich to a beggar only to be told that your sandwich is unacceptable because I have a gluten intolerance; therefore you are now obligated to buy me a sandwich made with gluten free bread.
DHH (d/Deaf or hard of hearing) person demanding captions is like a wanting extra cheese is wrong.
It’s more like your giving a sandwich to every beggar except the Deaf one. And eventually that Deaf beggar will starve.
Deaf people have significantly less access to public discourse. I think it’s the responsibility of every person engaged in public discourse to make their content accessible.
Uploading a video is trivial while captioning still requires significant effort. Most organizations either opt to manually transcribe internally (slow, repetitive, mindnumbing work) or outsource (expensive). Machine transcription is available but still fairly technical.
Transcripts are useful beyond hearing-impaired people, but the cost realistically must be balanced with the organizations other responsibilities...
> Uploading a video is trivial while captioning still requires significant effort.
No, actually it doesn't. You start with the automatic one that youtube creates and then edit it.
It takes about twice as long as watching the video (i.e. about 2 minutes for each minute of video).
Source: I've started doing this for videos I upload.
Yes, if your audio quality is bad, and youtube can't understand anything so you have to start from nothing it would be significant effort, as you say. But if your audio is clear, it's really not that hard.
If you want perfection (line breaks in logical places, not too much text at a time on the screen, captions synchronized perfectly with the speaker), the time goes up to about 4 or 5x, which is still not "significant effort".
A lot of videos get uploaded without any editing whatsoever, so is it really that hard to believe anything besides that is considered "significant effort"?
It takes 4-5x for my videos -- not going for perfection, just making nonsense into the math words I said reasonably clearly. Jargon can be tough for the automated captioning services. They are improving, and for the version I use for teaching it seems to learn the vocabulary as I go through the class. Maybe next year it'll know what an eigenvector is!
> Machine transcription is available but still fairly technical.
This isn't really true, on YouTube it's basically a check box[1]. Admittedly the quality isn't always perfect but it's trivial and better than nothing.
It is not better than nothing if it actively confuses the listener. I experienced this recently when I uploaded something that got captioned automatically without my knowledge (new rollout of automated captioning on a university content management system, not YouTube). I got a visit in office hours from a confused student who said he'd spent significant time looking for African and Afghan linear spaces and simply could not find the definitions.
Apple are way ahead here. Put a product on their store with a video and you have to do captions.
Actually their captions are the karaoke format and you can do decent typesetting. I hope for a future when all video has captions with CSS styling rather than the baked in format of TV news.
A collegue of mine is heavily involved in them and gets very animated in championing them. It all sounds very interesting when he talks about them, however it doesn't tend to stick in my mind.
Maybe if you're an expert at it. Transcribing, then timing the subtitle seems like a lot of work.
Have you even tried with auto captions? Youtube is pretty good with it lately. I watched the first 2 minute of the video with auto captions and it's about 80-90% accurate.
In reality, captioning isn’t that hard. Very few people are willing to go to the trouble of uploading a video but won’t caption it.