Breakthrough for UK broadcasting

Comedy channel Dave is putting manual closed captions on all its YouTube content, to make it more accessible to those with hearing difficulties.

Broadcaster UKTV says the move make it the first major UK broadcaster advertising-based video on demand social media channel to provide accurate subtitles for 100 per cent of its videos.

Before implementing manual captions, viewers had to rely on the captions automatically generated by YouTube, which can be very inaccurate.

Viewers have been quick to make use of the new captions, with 22 per cent viewing content with subtitles, up from just 5 per cent who did so with the automatically generated versions.

Erina Jones, UKTV’s head of social, said: "UKTV is committed to improving accessibility and this is another great step forward.

‘We now have subtitles on 100  of our content across digital AVOD platforms which includes our on demand service, UKTV Play, and now the Dave YouTube channel, which is growing at pace."’

Dave’s YouTube channel last year attracted more than 8.4m views and a total of 580,000 viewing hours.

Published: 10 Feb 2022