I might be committing some sort of forum heresy posting the following here, but the issue is important and immediate.
In a announcement made on July 31st 2020, Google/YouTube are shutting down their Community Contributions feature after September 28, 2020.
This affects millions of non-English speaking and hearing impaired viewers drastically, as dedicated teams of volunteer transcribers will no longer be able to directly translate or transcribe videos for independent producers.
As I suppose, most AR forumites will know I am hearing impaired and this ill considered decision will prevent me and millions of other hearing impaired viewers from benefiting from the excellent caption service that up to this point has been provided. It will detract from the quality of our lives and relegate us as an unimportant demographic.
I frequently view independently produced videos on subjects of current news, history and science that rely on the Community Contributions feature. Captioning takes time and effort; most producers lack the resources and depend on volunteers not only to provide the transcripts in English but in many other languages as well ie Tagalog that is not accommodated for in the automatic translations. The automatic captioning service that Google recommends was long ago ignored by the volunteer transcribers because it had the English skills for specific terms and jargon equal to that of my cat. Did you know Linnaeus was a sweetest biologist? A lame example but when the dialogue gets onto actual scientific terms the automatic captioning is rendered meaningless. I have had to request clarifications from other hearing viewers via the comments section. Apparently the transcription of recorded music lyrics is also a mess.
There is so much wrong with this decision and I can provide examples of how it directly affects me but time, space and patience prevents me from adding more.
Please support the protest to keep the Community Contribution feature by signing the following online petition.
It probably wont prevent the āsuitsā at Google from doing what they like. Google claims to be working to provide improved services but why didnāt they wait until those services were available to replace the current one?
My cynicism meter is overheating. Google recently campaigned for my support against my government legislating for this billion dollar service to start paying some of its long overdue tax in my country.
Thanks in advance.
didnāt mean to imply I thought you were stupid (far from my mind) although you were wondering around the old forum ālostā, looking for the door here 
