An Exploration of Captioning Practices and Challenges of Individual Content Creators on YouTube for People with Hearing Impairments

TL;DR

This study investigates the practices, challenges, and perceptions of individual YouTube content creators and DHH audiences regarding video captions, aiming to improve caption quality and trust for viewers with hearing impairments.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of captioning practices and perceptions from both creators and DHH audiences, addressing a significant gap in understanding caption quality issues.

Findings

DHH audiences face challenges with caption accuracy and trust.

Content creators encounter technical and perceptual challenges in captioning.

Enhanced caption practices can improve confidence and accessibility for DHH viewers.

Abstract

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.