A History of YouTube’s Closed Captions Part II: Bringing It All Together

I'm not hearing impaired but, when reading t'intarwebs in bed, I'll quite often watch a YouTube video with the sound off and closed captions on, so as not to disturb the missus.

The thing that makes YouTube's closed captions nearly unusable for me is that they take up two lines and the lines scroll. Even if you adjust the font size to he much bigger, they just take up more room. There's no option to configure the captions to be on a single line.

If the video in question features someone speaking, there'll be quite a lot of continual text and, with autogenerated CCs, [which the vast majority are] a lot of it will be slightly wrong.

So I'll read the top line and start reading the bottom line which will suddenly scroll up, so it's now the top line, thus adding another fraction of a second for my eye-line to re-orientate, to the extra time my brain's already taken to process what $RandomIrrelevantWord in the middle of the sentence should actually be. By the time I've done that, the line has often scrolled up again out of sight, to be replaced by whatever line was previously the bottom line.

Rinse and repeat continuously.

It might sound counter-intuitive but if I could set the CC to only occupy one line, I'm sure I could read them faster and easier as the line would stay in the same place and not suddenly move upwards. Or, alternatively, keep them on two lines but replace the entire two lines each time. Don't scroll them.

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cf. also: Apple's Finder column view. What lunatic decided that making an tem slide out of the way when you click to select it was good GUI design?