An Exploration of Captioning Practices and Challenges of Individual Content Creators on YouTube for People with Hearing Impairments
This work addresses captioning accessibility for DHH individuals on video-sharing platforms, but it is incremental as it focuses on understanding existing practices rather than proposing new solutions.
The study investigated the problem of poor caption quality for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audiences on YouTube by exploring practices and challenges from both DHH viewers and individual content creators, finding that manually added caption tags can increase trust and revealing issues like back-captioning problems.
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audiences have long complained about caption qualities for many online videos created by individual content creators on video-sharing platforms (e.g., YouTube). However, there lack explorations of practices, challenges, and perceptions of online video captions from the perspectives of both individual content creators and DHH audiences. In this work, we first explore DHH audiences' feedback on and reactions to YouTube video captions through interviews with 13 DHH individuals, and uncover DHH audiences' experiences, challenges, and perceptions on watching videos created by individual content creators (e.g., manually added caption tags could create additional confidence and trust in caption qualities for DHH audiences). We then discover individual content creators' practices, challenges, and perceptions on captioning their videos (e.g., back-captioning problems) by conducting a YouTube video analysis with 189 captioning-related YouTube videos, followed by a survey with 62 individual content creators. Overall, our findings provide an in-depth understanding of captions generated by individual content creators and bridge the knowledge gap mutually between content creators and DHH audiences on captions.