YouTube Automatic Captioning “Makes Absolutely No Sense”, Says Vlogger

YouTube has stated that improving its automatic closed captioning system is “one of our top priorities” in response to a campaign organised by a hard-of-hearing vlogger.

Rikki Poynter, 23, claims that the captions are “99 per cent useless”. “I can look up a video about concealers and somehow the automatic closed captioning will be talking about zebras,” she told BBC’s Newsbeat.

Until the automatic service is fixed, Poynter’s campaign hopes to encourage popular YouTubers to manually caption their videos.

She is supported by a number of high-profile YouTubers, including Tyler Oakley and Tanya Burr.

Around 25 per cent of the videos on YouTube have captions, mostly automatic ones. The website has recently launched a new project, the community caption service, which allows fans to help caption videos. This has attracted thousands of submissions so far.

However, the sheer volume of content means that YouTube is unlikely to become fully subtitled soon.

“The challenge is a big one,” said Matthew Glotzbach, product manager at YouTube. More than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. “Although we ultimately hope to be able to have an algorithm that can do that automatically, we’re not there yet.”

The issue affects a significant number of people in the UK. Figures from Action on Hearing Loss show that 3.7 million people of working age and over 45,000 teenagers are affected.

While television benefits from an established captioning system, the same is not true for the internet.

Dr Roger Wicks, from the charity, claims that the insufficient captioning on YouTube is cutting people off from a “key social activity”.

YouTube says that they are “aggressively working on it”, stating that captioning is “an area that we’ve been committed to really from the beginning.”