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What I'm watching a lot of right now is the backlog of YouTube videos from this guy who followed his dream and started a poultry farm in Vermont (along with his wife, who chooses not to be a focus of the videos). It's charming to watch them because he has such enthusiasm and love for his work and the animals. It's sort of competence porn because while he's still learning, he usually goes about it in the most sensible way possible. Starting the farm was also done sensibly--they saved up and bought it outright instead of taking loans, and they both have full-time jobs and aren't relying on the farm for their living.
Anyway, that's just the intro and why I'm watching it right now (and why YouTube is constantly suggesting I watch farm and homestead-related videos and no! I will not get sucked into all of FarmTube!). Today's post also has a bit to do with web accessibility.
I often watch TV, movies and videos with captions turned on, partly because I listened to enough loud music in my youth that my hearing is not as good as it was--not degraded enough to be considered impaired, just enough that I have difficulty making out speech if there's a lot of ambient noise, either music or other noises in the video, or noises in the house. (Zoom meetings can be fun because of this, since everyone's mic is set differently, people keep moving away from the mic, causing me to turn the volume up, then suddenly make loud noises that cause me to jump.)
The other reason I use captions is that I've become fascinated by them since having to make the website at work accessible, since captions are a big part of that and I coach coworkers through how best to create and use captions.
I've found that YouTube's auto-captioning is actually really good, at least for English. I don't know any other language well enough to say if it's good for them. It gets about 90-95% of the words correct, and even when it screws up, there's enough correct that the messed-up ones are guessable from the context.
What does this have to do with watching Gold Shaw Farm's YouTube channel? Well, he doesn't put captions up himself so YouTube's auto-captions accompany his videos. He also raises ducks and geese (and some chickens because he's ironically allergic to duck eggs). Ducks and geese are noisy creatures. Noisy enough that YouTube's auto-caption bot occasionally picks them up and assumes they're human-produced noises and part of the soundtrack.
Occasionally as he's talking, the ducks and geese will be making a racket behind him, and YouTube helpfully captions them. So you'll see inappropriate [applause], [laughter] and one I saw for the first time today, [music] captions pop up in the videos.
That was a lot of typing to explain one amusing thing, but it makes me laugh every time.
Anyway, that's just the intro and why I'm watching it right now (and why YouTube is constantly suggesting I watch farm and homestead-related videos and no! I will not get sucked into all of FarmTube!). Today's post also has a bit to do with web accessibility.
I often watch TV, movies and videos with captions turned on, partly because I listened to enough loud music in my youth that my hearing is not as good as it was--not degraded enough to be considered impaired, just enough that I have difficulty making out speech if there's a lot of ambient noise, either music or other noises in the video, or noises in the house. (Zoom meetings can be fun because of this, since everyone's mic is set differently, people keep moving away from the mic, causing me to turn the volume up, then suddenly make loud noises that cause me to jump.)
The other reason I use captions is that I've become fascinated by them since having to make the website at work accessible, since captions are a big part of that and I coach coworkers through how best to create and use captions.
I've found that YouTube's auto-captioning is actually really good, at least for English. I don't know any other language well enough to say if it's good for them. It gets about 90-95% of the words correct, and even when it screws up, there's enough correct that the messed-up ones are guessable from the context.
What does this have to do with watching Gold Shaw Farm's YouTube channel? Well, he doesn't put captions up himself so YouTube's auto-captions accompany his videos. He also raises ducks and geese (and some chickens because he's ironically allergic to duck eggs). Ducks and geese are noisy creatures. Noisy enough that YouTube's auto-caption bot occasionally picks them up and assumes they're human-produced noises and part of the soundtrack.
Occasionally as he's talking, the ducks and geese will be making a racket behind him, and YouTube helpfully captions them. So you'll see inappropriate [applause], [laughter] and one I saw for the first time today, [music] captions pop up in the videos.
That was a lot of typing to explain one amusing thing, but it makes me laugh every time.
