YouTube has pledged to improve its automatic subtitling for videos as soon as possible after telling the BBC the service was nowhere near good enough.
It brought the facility in following a well-publicised campaign by hard-of-hearing vlogger Rikki Poynter to provide other hard-of-hearing and deaf users with the ability to enjoy videos as much as those who can hear perfectly.
But Poynter has said the subtitles “make absolutely no sense 99% of the time” and has contacted YouTube to improve its service or scrap the service altogether.
Many high-profile vloggers have given their support to Poynter prompting YouTube to launch a community caption service where users can caption content themselves. Over 2,000 caption submissions were sent to YouTube within days of the service going live.
Well-respected beauty vlogger Tanya Burr said: “People actually turn the subtitles on sometimes just for fun because they’re like it’s so hilarious seeing what they’ll actually come up with because it’s completely wrong.”
Another vlogger, Tyler Oakley, went so far as to close caption all his posts meaning they can all be subtitled so as to make them “more inclusive.” He thinks the idea of subtitles is “cool” as “millions and millions more people can enjoy my content.”
Currently around one quarter of Google’s video content has closed captions, with the majority being its own automatic subtitles.
Matthew Glotzbach, YouTube product manager, said: “Although I think having auto caption is better than nothing I fully admit and I fully recognise that it is by no means good enough yet.
“It’s an area that we’ve been committed to really from the beginning.”
YouTube has more than one billion unique users every month and over six billion hours of video are viewed every month. This is the equivalent of each person in the world watching an hour of video every month on the website.
The charity Action on Hearing Loss has revealed an increase in the number of people complaining about the automatic subtitles on YouTube, with Dr Roger Wicks, director of policy and campaigns stating: “There’ll be tens of thousands of people in their 20s who have hearing loss trying to access YouTube. It’s a key social activity.
“We talk about what we see on television and increasingly YouTube so it’s critical we get this [subtitling] right.”
In the UK more than 45,000 under 18 year olds are registered deaf and a further 3.7 million people of working age across the UK suffer from hearing loss.
Tinnitus is one of the most common forms of hearing loss in the country with around one in 10 of the population suffering from it. The condition is caused by excess noise from working environments like factories or being exposed to live music that’s too loud for a long time. There is currently no cure but several treatments are being developed.
To raise awareness of the condition, Tinnitus Awareness Week is taking place from the second to the eighth of February. To find out more about the campaign, please click here.
If you or your loved one has developed hearing loss as a result of your working environment you might be entitled to make a claim for compensation. Give our experienced team a call on 0800 999 1875 or contact us online here. You can also visit our dedicated website www.ringing-inears.co.uk for more information.