Youtube is removing its community captions functionality in the end of September 2020, and this has created some discussion regarding accessibility. Mainly due to the hard of hearing community, which benefits from that feature.
However, there are other ways to contribute or create your own captions for any Youtube video out there, and help this community watch any video they want. Plus, these tools help with any language barrier. Let me list some options you will have for this:
Option 1: Use third party websites that provide community captions. There you can watch Youtube videos with captions from their own platforms that may not be available on Youtube directly. Examples are Captionfy (my baby) and Amara.org (my inspiration). With these platforms, people can create their own captions and anyone who needs them can watch the video now using their custom subtitles.
Option 2: Use a Chrome Extension. Yash Agarwal’s Subtitles For YouTube is an extension that allows you to use their library of captions in Youtube videos. It also allows you to upload your own captions.
In the end, any public Youtube video should be accessible by any person, no matter if there is a language barrier or a hearing problem. I hope these platforms can help everyone to access a broader variety of Youtube videos.
Captionfy is helping me achieve my goal to help with accessibility, and I hope many others can benefit from it :)
Here is a preview of how a subtitle editor may look like
Top comments (3)
Hey João!
Glad to see there are so many projects to keep captions alive even after YouTube's removing of them. I myself am working together with the youtubexternalcc.netlify.app/ dev and a few others in hopes of building a unified platform to "share" subtitles/captions across DIFFERENT websites.
So everyone can have their own solution, but a translation uploaded on any one of these will show up on "partner" projects as well.
If you would be interested, we would love to see you on our Discord Server:
discord.gg/8JQuC45
Hey Mad Programmer! Thank you for contacting me, I really appreciate it. Right now to be honest I have too much going on trying to handle my job at the same time with side projects like Captionfy, and unfortunately I am not interested in joining a bigger project at this moment. I started this project for fun and to use it myself to be able to organise my own captions, and right now honestly I think it is a bit too early for me to decide on joining another project like yours… I think it is great that you guys are doing it, but I would ask for some patience for me to organise my life and think more about it.
Again, thank you very much for reaching out to me, and I will think more in the next months about it. I find it really awesome that you guys are doing it as well, these projects are helping a lot of people :)
Have a great weekend, and hopefully we talk again in the future!
João
Hey João!
Much appreciated, I think the rest of are also very busy with real life right now (throughout November and December too probably).
So yeah, let's keep in touch, if we ever find the time to work together :D
The Mad Programer