How many times have you clicked on a YouTube video only to be met with silence or background music that seems to go on until the video concludes? I just had this experience with a video that sounded interesting about the history of Microsoft windows. I assume all kinds of screenshots and perhaps funny memes were going on visually but that meant absolutely nothing to me. Artificial intelligence has gotten good enough to produce what I believe is pretty reliable closed captioning for folks who are hard of hearing but no similar automated technology yet exists for descriptive video. It’s like people who create these videos don’t even consider the experience of a blind person trying to get something from their video. Or, I know plenty of fully sighted folks who like to listen to videos while they are working out, driving or otherwise occupied such that they aren’t looking at their screens. At a minimum, you’d think they consider these use cases. Anyway, rant over. :)
Comments
Rant.
That is definitely something I would take up a post with. Glad I'm not the only one :) . anyway, good rant! It would do good on Change.org or some other big site. Oh my gosh, that would be so cool if that actually worked! I believe this is something major vlog stars (and even not so major ones) should concider when making videos. for me, I would probably just Dislike the videos and comment something like "I cannot understand anything which this video is attempting to convey, as you have neglected to add audio that is little more than background sounds, to clearly convey this information to those who may have trouble seeing what is presented onscreen" to all of them.
Solutions
There's a company called VerbalEyes who is trying to build AI to solve this problem.
In the meantime, however, the best solution is to use screen recognition. Although it's far from perfect, you might get something out of it.
I agree
Yes!!! I cant stand videos that are completely silent or only have music and just are visual. I know its a visual world but it is beyond annoying and frustrating when I find videos like that. It isnt just youtube either ive seen it on twitter and instagram too.
Rant?
There are too many people who don't think that blind people even exist, and if they do, they don't think that we're capable of watching videos, let alone actually learning anything from them. It's frustrating for sure when I come across such videos. I understand that they are not for me, and even with sighted people, everyone learns differently. I definitely think there should be some kind of artificial intelligence program to help to describe what is being shown on screen visually. We're never going to live in a perfect world where everything is going to be accessible for us, and that is something that we will unfortunately have to come to terms with at some point. I wish there Was Some kind of program that could describe music videos. That would be very cool and interesting to have at our disposal. Ultimately, why would they care? If one video isn't working, find one that works for you. Sometimes, that's easier said than done, though, and most people aren't going to take that extra step to make accessibility a priority, even when they do know, unless it's convenient or profitable for them to do so. You don't like the video? Fine, whatever. They are still making their money regardless. Sighted people generally have more options available to them, and if I wasn't blind, maybe I wouldn't even care, or even think how my video would potentially affect blind people if it wasn't accessible to them.
It doesn't bother me personally.
I just move on.
Interesting
Describing music videos is a complex and very definitive art. I follow a band and asked the young lady who's the singer a simple question. I understand your song, but what's in the video? because the video can be about a guy going fishing beer in hand as the song says, or as follows an eloquent sceen which was portrayed of what happened next. Google Halestorm Familiar taste of poison, I think the last line is treatment. The song is about a woman who is having a difficult time with letting go of a relationship and the man in question is trying to keep her with the "familiar taste of poison." This young lady when on about four pages with such a vivid description that years later, I am still in awe they have described it so well. They are a large success now but it makes me smile they did that not just for me. The story si simple, having some write such a description is not possible for AI at the moment.
@siobhan that's cool they…
@siobhan that's cool they described their video in that much detail. Not many people would have done that. Hmmm... I may have to look it up now. I discovered Halestorm about 5 years ago and they're pretty good. Their new album is all the more interesting after I read on Apple Music about how all the songs came to be.
As for videos without any dialog, it doesn't bother me too much. Although I wonder why the text recognition that's supposed to work in videos doesn't yet work with YouTube.
Playing around with Fitness+ makes me wonder if ML will eventually be good enough to generate video descriptions. The audio hints that are generated with TTS remind me of the AD you normally get with movies or TV shows. I've seen some YouTube videos where the person talking is using a TTS, and it took me a minute to figure that out because whatever voice/speech rate combo they're using sounds pretty life-like.
I don't think AI-generated audio description will ever be as good as a human, kind of like the image descriptions are now. So I miht find it more annoyar than useful. Maybe not though.