YouTube adds captions for all videos to improve accessibility

The move has been welcomed by groups representing deaf and hard-of-hearing users as an important step in ensuring that non-textual online content is accessible to people with hearing problems.

YouTube has been trialling automatic captioning with selected user groups since last November and this week announced the extension of the feature to all videos.

"Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer," said a YouTube statement. "The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version … We are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users."

"Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding," said the statement.

Viewers of a video can click on the arrow at the bottom right of the video screen to turn subtitles on or off. They can also set YouTube to turn subtitles on automatically for every video they watch. Users can also change the size of text and the characteristics of the background.

People uploading videos can also upload corrections to the automated script or their own transcripts of what is said in a video and YouTube will then run those as subtitles.

The Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID) said that YouTube's innovation would be useful to people with hearing problems.

"RNID welcomes Google taking this first step towards making YouTube more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing viewers," said Emma Harrison, RNID's director of external affairs. "Captioning will significantly help people with a hearing loss understand video content and increase their ability to share experiences of watching those in which speech plays a prominent part."

"We believe that all on-demand content should be accessible and RNID will continue lobbying hard to ensure that people with a hearing loss have better opportunities to enjoy subtitled videos, movies and television programmes," she said.

YouTube said that once text files were attached to videos they could be used as the basis of automated translations. "Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages," it said.

It said that it would take time to go back through the many millions of videos uploaded to it over the years, but said that any publisher of a video could request that it be processed for captioning to speed that process up.

Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said the innovation could aid organisations' compliance with UK law.

"The Disability Discrimination Act generally expects businesses that put videos online to make them accessible to people with hearing impairments. The time, cost and hassle of doing that has caused the duty to be neglected, though," said Robertson.

"I suspect Google's captioning functionality will make YouTube a more attractive platform for online video for organisations that want to fulfil their accessibility duties without significant cost. The answer is not just to upload your videos to YouTube, though. It's also about checking that the automated captions reflect the content accurately and fixing them when they don't," he said.