Speaker 1: You know what's pretty accessible? Video. Videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix. There's so many platforms to watch video. But, video isn't the only component of video. You see, as a filmmaker, I believe that video is 50% video, 50% audio. And the problem is that we tend to forget that some people don't have access to 50% of the video. And what I mean is, for people who are blind, we don't always have access to the visual elements of a story, and for people who are hard of hearing or deaf, they don't always have access to the audio portions of the story. Now, of course, there's ways to accommodate this, whether it be audio descriptions or closed captions. And currently, YouTube does support one of those things, being closed captions for the hard of hearing and deaf. As a creator, I try to make sure that all my content is closed captioned manually. You see, YouTube has a system that auto-captions videos. And the problem is that many creators think that this is the best way to go. You know, they just, they see it as, oh, my videos are already captioned. No, no they're not. But the truth is, how do I put this nicely? The auto-generated captions are crap. My good friend, Ricky Poynter, who I've done videos with in the past, has started a campaign called No More Craptions, and I fully support this initiative. Now, look, I'm gonna give props to YouTube, because in theory, automated closed captions are pretty cool. It's an independent content creation website, and you cannot guarantee that everyone, or even half the people on this website are gonna closed caption their videos. However, that still is not a great substitute in practice. Because for people who have to rely on these closed captions in order to get 50% of the video content, they just end up being lost, confused, and it's a mess. Content creators who can hear, how would you feel if you started watching videos, and you could only understand 50%? Or, you were using the auto-generated captions, and that still made no sense. Here's an example. I got my friend Abby, who is hard of hearing, to watch a video with me. Now, I hadn't seen this video either. She hasn't. We decided to watch a content creator who happens to not caption their videos. We turned on the YouTube automated caption system, and we tried to watch it that way, and well, here's the result. Hi, hey, so I'm here with my friend Abby, and we're about to watch a YouTube video that isn't closed captioned manually. It happens to be Casey Neistat. I'm sure you've heard of him. He's one of the fastest growing YouTubers as of recent, and he has a lot of videos, a lot, because he makes daily movies. He doesn't close caption his videos. He doesn't pay someone to close caption, even though they're like, it costs as much as a decent cup of coffee every day. Can you hear me at all?

Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty, it's pretty well.

Speaker 1: All right, cool.

Speaker 2: You're looking away, so I'm trying hard. I'm Abby, I'm hard of hearing, so this is, we're gonna watch it with auto-generated captions. Yeah, so. And I'm gonna try and figure out what it's about.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so YouTube has auto-generated captions, so we'll see how this goes.

Speaker 3: You ready? Ready.

Speaker 1: Just so we're on the same playing field.

Speaker 2: I'm doing pretty well so far. Giselle, first one with the wax, what?

Speaker 1: Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. Cucumber, cute things.

Speaker 2: I like, the beginning I was understanding, and now it's just going downhill very quickly.

Speaker 1: You know, something I've noticed with a lot of these videos, I'll turn on the automated captions, and I'll be kind of impressed with the first 10 seconds. Then it just goes to craptions.

Speaker 2: You right, you right. I can't tell if at some point he's trying to be rhymy, because some of the words are rhyming, like if he's doing some kind of slam poetry kind of thing.

Speaker 1: That was the video. The context of the video, I was able to sort of like, from what I could gather, ooh, I'm zoomed in, very zoomed in. I'm zooming in more.

Speaker 2: You're getting closer. Gotta get that dramatic zoom.

Speaker 1: All right, he had a layover before you went to, it said Cape Town, but I'm pretty sure it was like,

Speaker 2: Cape Town, South Africa. I got that much. I don't know, this is like my job, figuring out auto-generated captions. It's just what I do.

Speaker 1: So he had a layover in London, and he was meeting up with a friend.

Speaker 2: I thought, like most of his friends live in London, is what I thought he said at one point. There was this one like 15 second period where a lot of the captions were like rhymy kind of. I really don't know if he was saying something that was supposed to be rhyming, or if he was, that was just what the captions were like, and he was like, oh, it needs to be like slam poetry style for like half a sec.

Speaker 1: And then there was one beginning that you see like when they're talking about blacks or something.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And then like brainwashing everyone.

Speaker 1: I was really confused by that. I didn't know the context of what that was.

Speaker 2: Because he was, what was he getting? Like a MetroCard or something?

Speaker 1: Something about cucumbers being cute.

Speaker 2: Yeah, cucumber cute things. He was, it was looking at a friend, but I have no idea. Maybe it was a name, and then someone's so cute.

Speaker 1: So that was fun. We're gonna actually watch it again, but this time with audio.

Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll see how that works out for me. I just realized that this is really gonna help.

Speaker 1: She's got some hearing. And part of, I feel like part of the dialogue may have been like part of a song maybe that was playing.

Speaker 3: Oh, that's true. Maybe. That definitely could have been it.

Speaker 1: The problem is with captions, sorry, auto-generated captions, it's not gonna have the little music symbol to tell you this is a song, because it's not gonna know that.

Speaker 4: So I'm flying from New York to Cape Town, South Africa with a 10 hour layover in London. I'm gonna make the best of that layover.

Speaker 5: ♪ Yo, this is a rap I made, how'd we all bounce aside? ♪ You're right, you're right. ♪ Most of the black kids are brainwashed, ♪ ♪ putting a brother down to fit in his socks. ♪ ♪ Intelligent maybe, but not very bright, ♪ ♪ I'm living in a world of fright, this ain't right. ♪

Speaker 4: Two of my closest friends in the whole world are in town right now. This is their hotel. Where are the girls? You ready? Yeah. ♪♪♪

Speaker 2: Cute girl. Cute girl.

Speaker 1: She is cute. You're such a cute girl.

Speaker 6: I don't think so. Wow.

Speaker 1: So, it makes a lot more sense when you can, you know, know what's going on. So again, the captions, they were off, but they weren't like, obviously they're not formatted either because it's all like word for word.

Speaker 2: You were right with the song thing though. That never crossed my mind. Not even once that it was like, maybe there's a song on the back.

Speaker 1: Anything you want to say?

Speaker 2: I mean, like for someone that doesn't like fully rely on captions to just be like, oh, it's just audio generated. I'll turn them off for this one video. I can see how people wouldn't necessarily care. For me, that's like my biggest thing. If it's not on like full blast kind of thing, I can't hear it. And so if they're auto generated captions and I want to watch a new YouTuber like Casey and I don't know their style, I don't know what they do. I've lost no idea what's going on. I don't know who these people are.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So as you can see, the short film by Casey Neistat wasn't very understandable. So that's a result for people who are hard of hearing or deaf who have to follow the video along with automated captions. It ends up leaving the viewer lost, confused, and uninterested in the content. Don't get me wrong. YouTube has done strives for the people who want closed captions, need closed captions. But relying solely as a creator on the automated closed captions for my video is a terrible move. So what's the right thing to do? Well, you should manually closed caption your videos. If not you, have a service do it for you because it's the best way to help new viewers who are either hard of hearing or deaf come to your channel. Not only that, but viewers who are not native speakers of your language can help follow along with the written words in the captions. I've captioned a few of my videos by myself. However, I use a service called Rev which only costs a dollar a minute, which is really solid. There are many other captioning services out there. Some might be a little bit more competitive in price or more expensive, but maybe more professional. I don't know. I recommend doing some research, finding what works best for you and your budget and closed captioning your videos because it helps not only the creator, but the viewer. Also closed captioning helps you in the algorithm if you're trying to rank in the search because the more people that your video's accessible to, the higher and the better it will do. Just some knowledge there for you. So what did we learn today? YouTube's doing awesome stuff for accessibility, but some gimmicks with accessibility fall short. I hope you learned as a content creator that closed captioning is important and accessibility is vital for growth. If you wanna learn in detail how to closed caption videos, check out Ricky Pointer's videos on how to go about doing that. Links will be down below. There will also be a card that you can click and you can do that because it's important. Accessibility's important. Thank you guys so much for checking out this video. I hope you take something away from it and happy Deaf Awareness Month. Caption those videos. Bye. Hey everyone, James Rath here. I'm joined by Ricky Pointer. Hello. We've done a... My name is James Rath. I was born legally blind with ocular albinism and nystagmus.

Speaker 3: Hi, my name is Ricky Pointer and I am a deaf YouTuber. What is up everyone?

Speaker 4: I am Lolo and I am...