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YouTube Analysis: Upcoming Project

For our upcoming project, I was assigned to evaluate YouTube and its accessibility features. I won't be jumping into the accessibility features just yet, but I thought it would be neat to dive into some of the great features of YouTube that I've discovered thus far since I began my research.

YouTube will forever be an enigma to me. I don’t have much experience with YouTube aside from a few things
  • In the Purduettes, we have recordings of our daily rehearsals. I watch these on days when I have been excused from our daily rehearsals, and I access them through a hyperlink in our daily email announcements,
  • My father loves to play videos for me when I am home from school, and his website of choice is YouTube. This does not require me to use YouTube, but rather he clicks around and shows me things,
  • When I was applying for the fall 2019 Disney College Program, I watched lots of YouTube videos about applying, the waiting process, and what to expect when you’re hired.
Something I can immediately appreciate about YouTube is that you don’t have to pay for a subscription. I log in through my Google account, and bam I’m YouTubing. I’m honestly amazed at how vast YouTube is. I’ve heard people say that when they’re bored, they find themselves down a YouTube rabbit hole. You can quite literally get lost within YouTube. You start off watching America’s Funniest Home Videos and end up watching a woman building a bookcase that doubles as a secret door. It’s the most absurd thing!

I love that YouTube’s home page includes keywords below the search bar that, based on your previous searches, can help you think of more things to search. For example, on mine, it shows words like “Hamilton,” “Harry Potter,” “Disney College Program,” and “Christmas music.” These are all things that I have personally found interest in and watched the occasional video about. Down below that, YouTube also shows recommended videos specifically based on things you’ve already watched. I see all of the recommended videos, and I’ll usually start my way down a YouTube rabbit hole. They don’t all make sense based on my previously watched videos, but most of them do.

A feature that I remember came out several years ago is the autoplay button on YouTube. If you click on a video that you want to watch, the video will show up on your screen off-center. On the right side above the recommended other videos, there is a button that says “AUTOPLAY” with a blue dot beside it. This means that once the video you are watching is finished, instead of stopping entirely until you decide to watch something else, YouTube will automatically keep playing video after video of things that the website thinks you will like. This was a somewhat controversial feature at the time of its release, but I honestly love it! I never forget to unclick it when I don't need videos to autoplay, but it's fantastic for when I do want to watch multiple videos recommended for me. I also love that YouTube recognizes the space bar as a pause button. I know that Disney+ does not, even though it's been out for an entire year now, and that always perturbed me.

Despite all of the wonderful things that YouTube does right, they still swarm users with thousands of ads each time someone opens the website. These ads appear in the middle of long videos, before videos, between videos, and sometimes it is impossible to get rid of them. I especially hate the ones that I have to sit and watch for an entire 30 seconds. But some ads come with the option to "skip ad" after being forced to endure it for the first 5 seconds of torment.

As a whole, I can completely understand the infatuation with YouTube. It has its ups and downs, as does every website, but overall it's been around so long that they've really fine-tuned the site. It's amazing to me that even with all the videos on one website, it never seems to run slowly, and before I know it, I'm suddenly learning how to disassemble my car key.

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