007 - Accessibility of Lefttube

Hey, y'all! This one's a bit more laid-back
today. I'm just gonna be talking about some things regarding this weird YouTube niche called Breadtube or Lefttube or whatever...

At least we didn't end up with Butterhorse, for fuck's sake...

[laughing]

<whispering> ...butterhorse...

I've been seeing discussion around how
leftists should be striving for accessibility in the movement, especially in online spaces.

Combined with some of my own ideas, this should make a nice jumping-off point for anyone else who believes in making their ideas accessible to all people.

Now, there's two ways I wanted to address this issue.

First: in the "make content easier to access for those who require different accommodations way." I'm talking anyone with physical and/or mental
and/or learning disabilities, anyone who may need to get around language barriers, anyone who needs extra time to process information, anyone who just can't listen to a video, etc.

The second way I wanted to tackle this was in the "make leftist ideas accessible to the average, everyday working person way," but seeing as this is the very point of Lefttube as a whole, I'm gonna leave this one more or less alone during this video, and mostly focus on pure accessibility.

Now, here's the bit where I totally just start ripping off of other people's ideas here; specifically, @slightlysluggy on Twitter.

(Just kidding, I have her full permission here, please go follow her account.)

If you do written work like actual essays, or you publish your transcripts in conjunction with your YouTube videos, then please make your writing more accessible and easier to read if you can.

Break up different ideas by using line breaks, dividers, etc.
use numerals instead of writing numbers out (so instead of saying "four hundred and twenty," you would just write 420)
use spaces or commas every three digits
use sans-serif fonts - 12-point or larger
bold text and larger style for emphasis
and be consistent in your style throughout your work.

If you're specifically into writing only, check out her full thread. I'll link it in the description down below. It's a lot more applicable for written work, but it can also be useful in editing your transcripts to be easier to read.

Basically, these ideas help anybody who may have reading difficulties, comprehension difficulties, who may need the extra accommodation for ease of understanding. No matter if you simply do written work or publishing a transcript, these are fairly simple changes that can be done to improve accessibility in your work.

Now, moving on to the purely YouTube side of things, I'm ripping off someone else here: one person by the name of Low T Charlie. Again, I have his full permission here. He made a video recently about ableism in leftist spaces, and how we should be making Lefttube more accessible to all people - in both the aspect of accommodation and in the theory aspect, as well.

He's absolutely right in both regards, but especially on the latter point: Lefttube does need to be making more breakdowns of theory in as many different ways as possible.

Well, when it comes to teaching theory and making it accessible to those who may need it, we have somewhat fallen behind in that regard. I'm not saying that theory focused channels don't exist - in fact they were some of the first channels to exist in this sphere - what is meant here is that, when it comes to theory, Lefttube should embrace a "diversity of tactics" and try to make leftist theory accessible to whatever learning style a person may need to be able to fully understand it.

So, having a mid-video break to ask questions about what you may have just heard, or opening up a conversation in the community section or private chats, or even taking somewhat unconventional routes of education and making theoretical ideas into something like, say, a song. After all, accessibility isn't just about accommodation in regards to learning disabilities: it's for everybody!

I'd imagine it would be especially useful to the working person in today's world who may not have the time or education to understand what's being talked about when it said that the imbalance between the production of 20 yards of linen, the labour time sunken into one coat and

<bewildered silverface> the profit garnered therefrom is

<still bewildered> representative of commodity fetishism?!

...Me, I'm talking about me here. Also, 20 yards of linen can make, like, six coats, Marx!

For my last point, and I'll be blunt from the start for this one: if you are a Lefttuber, turn on your community captions!

I completely understand that not everybody has the time or resources to caption their videos, for whatever reason. If you're slammed with work all the time or the video needing captions is three hours long, or you put out several videos per day...whatever. Unless you got the time and/or resources to do so, your videos probably won't be captioned. If you're speaking English, your video will probably be auto captioned, but it won't be correct - like 99% certain it will not be correct.

Community captions are a fantastic way to get around this problem. If you can volunteer your own time: take a video, sit down, and caption it. You can save progress in drafts, so don't think it has to be done all at once. If you're simply correcting the auto-generated English captions, then your work is halfway done for you already.

If you can caption in another language, please consider taking the time to do so. This opens up videos to viewers across the world who may not know English, or who may not know it very well. It also helps people learning other languages to, well, learn other languages. If you notice the Creator does not have the community captions option enabled: get in touch with them and encourage them to turn it on. It can only do good.

If you're a creator yourself: once someone submits a community caption to you, you can read through it and accept or reject it. If accepted it will be added to your video's CC options, and you can grab the file for future use (which is handy in the event of a video takedown and/or publishing elsewhere).

One last person I'd like to riff off from here is one Jessica Kellgren-Fozard. Her playlist on captioning is totally public; please, just go watch it for more specifics.

She has some good tips on the technicalities of captioning, but I'm specifically interested in what she has to say about community engagement. This is the part where this crosses into both areas of accessibility: accommodation of disability, and accessibility to the average person.

About 10% of all YouTube viewers use closed captions. That gives you good incentive to make sure your captions are not only present, but correct as well. You could potentially see a boost in viewer traffic, subscribers, viewer retention, viewer engagement, or all of these things.

And what does that mean? Quite simply, you have made a video more accessible to a wider range of people, who may not have been able to watch it before, for whatever reason. Also of note: captions do get indexed in search results, so whatever you say in a video is now searchable. Might make it easier to find your video, especially if you forgot to tag something important.

Now, here's where I want to point out something she said here: using open and closed captions in conjunction with one another to potentially beat out the censors. This is yet another facet of accessibility: keeping a video up as long as possible so as many people as possible get to see it.

If you know that a piece of theory you're going to be reading concerns, say, fa- BUNDLEOFSTICKSISM -

(the word "fascism" was cut off)

but you don't want your video to be flagged or hidden from search results, you could potentially censor the word in captions and audio and put the actual word on screen in editing. It'll probably help to keep your video up a little bit longer.

Just remember, when we say that we care about all peoples: we need to carry that principle to all people, not just those of us who are educated or who are completely able-bodied and neurotypical. We need to extend the empathy of the Left to all people, regardless of what they can do.

After all, like Kropotkin said: "all is for all."

Anyways, that's all for me today. I'd like to take this time to address all my new viewers and subscribers since the Fashwave video. I said it before: it's always the strange video, isn't it? A big thank you goes out four-way to both the guys at The Serfs, Jett Cloud, and Gutian for boosting my tiny channel to more people. Thanks, y'all.

I'd also like to give a giant thank you to my first patron, simply known as "C."

If you like my work and would like a place at the end of my videos, consider becoming a patron? Of course, if you want, and if you can.

If you liked this video, like it, if you don't like it, don't like it, and if you like what you see here, maybe subscribe? Anyways, thanks for watching, and I'll see you later! Bye.