Uploading a video is trivial while captioning still requires significant effort. Most organizations either opt to manually transcribe internally (slow, repetitive, mindnumbing work) or outsource (expensive). Machine transcription is available but still fairly technical.
Transcripts are useful beyond hearing-impaired people, but the cost realistically must be balanced with the organizations other responsibilities...
> Uploading a video is trivial while captioning still requires significant effort.
No, actually it doesn't. You start with the automatic one that youtube creates and then edit it.
It takes about twice as long as watching the video (i.e. about 2 minutes for each minute of video).
Source: I've started doing this for videos I upload.
Yes, if your audio quality is bad, and youtube can't understand anything so you have to start from nothing it would be significant effort, as you say. But if your audio is clear, it's really not that hard.
If you want perfection (line breaks in logical places, not too much text at a time on the screen, captions synchronized perfectly with the speaker), the time goes up to about 4 or 5x, which is still not "significant effort".
A lot of videos get uploaded without any editing whatsoever, so is it really that hard to believe anything besides that is considered "significant effort"?
It takes 4-5x for my videos -- not going for perfection, just making nonsense into the math words I said reasonably clearly. Jargon can be tough for the automated captioning services. They are improving, and for the version I use for teaching it seems to learn the vocabulary as I go through the class. Maybe next year it'll know what an eigenvector is!
> Machine transcription is available but still fairly technical.
This isn't really true, on YouTube it's basically a check box[1]. Admittedly the quality isn't always perfect but it's trivial and better than nothing.
It is not better than nothing if it actively confuses the listener. I experienced this recently when I uploaded something that got captioned automatically without my knowledge (new rollout of automated captioning on a university content management system, not YouTube). I got a visit in office hours from a confused student who said he'd spent significant time looking for African and Afghan linear spaces and simply could not find the definitions.
Transcripts are useful beyond hearing-impaired people, but the cost realistically must be balanced with the organizations other responsibilities...