Add closed captioning to your videos. We're not all hearing!

Aug 23, 2012

Rikki P.

I'm completely serious.

Contrary to popular belief, not everybody on this planet is hearing. That means not everybody can hear [as well as hearing people can]. Like me. I am hard of hearing. I am nearly deaf in my right ear and half deaf or so in my left ear. No, I don't want your pity. I'm not looking for apologies. I don't mind being deaf at all.

But what I and what we want is to be able to enjoy things online like hearing people can. We want to be able to watch all these videos on YouTube without getting a headache after ten minutes of playing "guess what this person just said".

Lip reading is a bit of a joke IRL, FYI. We only understand about 30% of what you are saying when we attempt to read your lips.

How do you CC? Well, you can do it via YouTube Interactive Transcript or whatever it's called. No, we can't just click on that and let YouTube do the work. Have you seen what it thinks we are all saying? I click on one video about concealers and YouTube is telling me that the video is about zebras, not concealer. That's how ridiculous the system is. Or you can do what I (and xiaorishu) do which is adding the text via your video editing program. I don't care what it is. I've done it with Windows Movie Maker (mind you, it wasn't gorgeous, but it was readable) and now I'm doing it with Corel Video Pro X4. It's just like adding text when you make a title or give us the little price tag at the corner of your video. Or adding your username to the video trying to watermark it.

I see these girls and boys talking in a different language and translating that into English (like Julia/MissCheviouswhoever) but... what about not adding the English when you're speaking English? I've translated German, English, Korean, and Mandarin. Translating German, Korean, and Mandarin is a lot harder and takes more time than adding English on English.

Again, I'm deaf. Or hard of hearing, but deaf is shorter and easier to use with people. Anyway. My videos take about fifteen minutes to caption. [Of course, I sometimes get distracted by the TV or Facebook or Twitter OF COURSE TWITTER LOL so it may take longer.] And again, I'm DEAF. If I'm DEAF and it only takes FIFTEEN MINUTES to CC most of my videos and I had to try twice as hard to understand MYSELF, just imagine how much shorter it'd probably be for those of you that hear better than me, depending on the length of your video.

You don't need to add every single word. We don't need your "like", um", and uh". But we want to know whether or not this new NAKED foundation is worth trying. We want to know that you don't like this new MAC collection that just came out. We want to know what you're saying in your introduction and we want to know what inspired you to create this makeup tutorial or this outfit.

We're like you.
We're human beings.
Don't forget about us because we can't hear [very well].
Allow us to enjoy your videos and allow yourself to bring this entire new world and group of people that want to watch your videos but it's a darn struggle to do so sometimes.

Please.

And thank you.

Aug 23, 2012

Rikki P.

Yo.

Aug 23, 2012

Olivia G.

I completely agree. My cousins are also deaf. More 'YouTube Gurus' should take this into consideration. Thanks for posting!

Aug 23, 2012

Rikki P.

I talked to one "big" guru and she told me to read the interactive transcript and I was like... it's telling me something completely different than what I know you're talking about. Unless you're actually talking about zebras and you just made the title concealer just to fool with all of us.

All she said was she had never seen it before, has ignored me since, and keeps uploading videos without any sort of text and I'm like, yeah, you care a lot about your viewers, hahaha.

Aug 24, 2012

Olivia G.

Aw man, that's so infuriating! And arrogant on their behalf....

Aug 24, 2012

Rikki P.

hahahah yeah i'm just like... ugh, really. you're supposed to be the~ nicest~ guru on youtube but this says differently.