YouTube axes community captions; insights from Rikki Poynter

Alex: Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us where you live? 

Rikki: Hello, I’m Rikki Poynter. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Alex: I reached out to you because you’ve been a longtime YouTuber, plus you’re one of the most leading advocates for captioning with different issues. Now, YouTube recently announced that they’re ending community contributed captions feature. 

[Screenshot of a The Verge article. Title: “YouTube is ending its community captions feature and deaf creators aren’t happy about it.” Italicized text: “The feature, which YouTube says was underutilized, will be discontinued in September” by Kim Lyons, July 31, 2020 at 11:07am EDT”. ]

Alex: Can you explain what community captions are? What’s that? 

Rikki: You have volunteers from your audience if you can’t do it yourself, or whatever. If you don’t have time, don’t understand how, or language stuff… Or don’t know other languages, your audience, if they want, can make captions for you. 

Alex: I saw you tweeted last week that you did have a meeting with YouTube for one hour a while ago, and you explained this to them. 

[Screenshot of @rikkipoynter retweet of @_CodeNameT1M on July 30. The original tweet is a reply to @rikkipoynter and @YouTube “Wait, are you f*cking for real now? It’s unbelievable, most of the Videos I watch have subtitles which were community driven. This is not okay… Any Idea about what to do now?” And Rikki retweets with this text: “Unfortunately, if they didn’t listen to me when we had our meeting, and didn’t listen to everyone telling them off in the comments months ago, I don’t think they’ll listen now.” ]

Alex: You met with them. Can you explain that meeting and what you said to them? 

Rikki: I told them that, for one, disabled people need it because not all disabled people can make captions like blind YouTubers, or if they can’t use their hands, right. Sometimes if deaf people aren’t comfortable typing or writing English, maybe their hearing friend or someone else like another deaf person who is comfortable with ASL and English can make the captions. So… We had a back and forth conversation about this. I hope they’ll be like “Ok. We’ll keep it.” But now… they announced there will be no community captions. I don’t know. 

Alex: Do you feel that was an ableist, audist decision? 

Rikki: I don’t know if I want to be fully direct about it and be like “Yeah!” But for me, I think probably yeah, because if we didn’t have community captions there’s less accessibility. So, like, I’ve told them - I said “If there are no more community captions, we won’t have access”. It’ll be a big disparity. For me, yeah, it feels a little bit oppressive. It’s frustrating. 

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Alex: What are you going to do now? 

Rikki: Honestly, I don’t know. Because I feel like there’s so many of us. I’ve tried to talk about this with YouTube, and they don’t want to listen.  I know there’s a petition right now, so I think a lot of people have signed it which is awesome, but will YouTube listen? I don’t know. I don’t know how that will work. But I hope so. I know YouTube is going to give other options for captions, like they’re offering to pay for a six months subscription or something, but when the six month period is over, what happens? Disabled YouTubers still can’t pay for another six months. So… I don’t know. 

Alex: Thank you for explaining your perspective on this. I appreciate your time. 

Rikki: Thank you for having me here. 

Alex: 

There is a change.org petition titled “Don’t remove comment captions from YouTube” that has over 425,000 signatures. 

https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-remove-community-captions-from-youtube