Lack of accessibility on the new Community Council Live Chat video?

Community General Discussion
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The video doesn’t have any captions available, auto-generated or otherwise. There isn’t even an useful bullet point list of talking points discussed in the Live Chat in the post.

At least two of the Community Council members are deaf. Neither were part of the Live Chat that the video covers.

So a couple questions:

  1. If Live Chat video post/thread was meant for Community Council members to discuss the contents of the video, how are deaf members (or other deaf players for that matter) meant to follow along and discuss?

  2. Was this an (hopefully) oversight on Blizzard’s part or did they just not want to bother trying to caption a public facing video this time or is this just YouTube doing YouTube things and just not making the auto-generated captions available for some reason?

Who knows? The only reason I noticed is because I’m deaf myself and I guess you could say I have a personal bias on this type of thing. Joys of playing life with sound permanently off.

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Hi Burn, you raise a very important concern here. I agree that there should have been closed captioning for that. I’m not a part of the Community Council, but I hope someone on the council will bring that up in the available thread that you linked.

Edit to add:
One thing you might want to do is reach out via e-mail to their accessibility team here:

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Hey, thanks! I’ll give that a try, but I don’t have high hopes. Lol

I knew the Accessibility team had some folks on Twitter but didn’t know they had a singular email like that. More you know, I guess!

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I don’t see why they would have a unique outlook on this sort of thing. I would assume they like the same things in the game as most other players.

I can turn on captions…

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The CC button on the video was greyed out and said it was unavailable at the time of the writing of my post.

Bad timing on my part, I guess. Thanks for pointing that out, though!

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Could be that youtube just hadn’t finished processing the auto-captions when you 1st tried.

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Probably.

In my experience YouTube either takes an eternity or straight up doesn’t bother making the auto-captions available on videos over a certain length.

Like for example, full length VODs that streamers sometimes upload to YouTube after their live session on Twitch or whatnot. Doesn’t usually bother me since streamers usually either edit VODs down to their own separate shorter videos or hire an editor to do it.

This case just bothered me because Blizzard was inviting people to discuss in that post, so by the time the auto-captions were turned on the discussion could have been already had and moved on from. Fortunately, it seems like it kicked on really quick this time.

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