Community Captions

We all know YouTube is a great resource for sharing videos online. It makes uploading videos so accessible that 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute! There are more than 1 billion users and 10%, or approximately one hundred million users, are deaf or need some assistance to keep up with the content of video. To accommodate them, YouTube has developed a feature called "Automatic Captions" which uses speech recognition technology to "automatically" detect words and translate them into written captions.

But, the problem is- the quality and accuracy of automatic captions vary from video to video. Because of this inconsistency, this feature is rarely used. Some users are generous enough to caption their own videos, but it can be time-consuming and sometimes even expensive. This means hundred of thousands of videos out there are not accessible to everyone. I have an idea that would change that.

I was inspired by reddit.com and Wikipedia to develop a feature, called "Community Captions," that would allow users to write in their own captions, and other users could add-to, correct, or elaborate on existing captions. Similar to how reddit manages their content, YouTube could have a "priorities" page where users could see which videos have the greatest demand for captioning. By adding a simple call to action, "caption this!" button, users could determine the priority of a video based on how many clicks it received. An aspect of this feature, inspired by Wikipedia, is community approval. By allowing people to write and edit captions in a collaborative way, it would maintain neutrality and verifiability. Similar to reddit, Viewers would be empowered to down vote or up vote the caption quality to deter vandalism.

If a YouTube user sees a video that needs captioning and wants to contribute, it could be time consuming to type in lines of dialogue for an entire video. But... since automatic captions already exist, users can start there and make quick edits to improve the accuracy and quality. The YouTube community can then approve it and it will be removed as a priority or disapprove of it and it will be resubmitted for editing on the priority page. While this idea helps the caption-reliant community, it benefits YouTube as well!

With improved accessibility, the number of users and subscribers could potentially increase. It's also a new way to monitor viewer activity and demographics. Additionally, It would be easy to link Community Captions to Google Translate and invite users to contribute by editing in different languages! Trying to find a video you heard about? Captions could improve keyword searches, making it easier to find a video by googling a line you remember. The benefits of this feature could be endless! But most importantly, it increases accessibility for people who are missing out.