Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4
Please do not spread falsehoods.
Disclamer: I work at YouTube.
This is how my subtitles / closed captions have looked for me on youtube for a year or so now [1] (on up-to-date Mac Chrome). The font is extremely small and blurry and practically transparent, and there is a horrible background color, which is usually yellow until a week or so ago, but has now changed to green for Christmas.
All I want for Christmas is readable YouTube text. I'm so glad YouTube is trying to keep up with the season's festivities by changing the background color of their absolutely unreadable text from yellow to green, but shouldn't they try to make the text readable by default somehow instead? Maybe a point size larger than 10 points, and a transparency higher than 10 percent, and a neutral or at least less nauseating background color?
Do all users have different randomly selected fonts and point sizes and colors? Why does it change randomly without any user intervention? Is this some sort of a/b/.../z testing? Get it together, YouTube!
I most certainly didn't do anything to configure the closed captions like this. Are there keyboard commands so power users can quickly switch fonts to strange colors and point sizes, that my cats may have pressed when walking on my keyboard?
Some genius at YouTube decided to implement persistent keyboard shortcuts that enable cats to easily and stealthily change the closed captioned text into unreadable colors!
My cat can press "o" to make the text lighter and fuzzier, and press "b" to cycle through a garish series of primary background colors plus black and white, including the same color as the text, rendering it invisible. There may be others, but I can't tell and I'm afraid to try.
Hoping that my opposable thumbs would enable me to get some help, I pressed "?" expecting to get a list of keyboard shortcuts, but that didn't do anything but violate the Principle of Least Astonishment [2].
It's not all my cat's fault, though -- some of the blame lies with YouTube: purposefully designing, implementing and not documenting such annoyingly cat-friendly but unhelpfully user-hostile keyboard shortcuts.
Googling for "youtube keyboard shortcuts" doesn't show any links to official YouTube documentation on the first page of results -- the top featured hit is an outdated page from an "SEO Consultant" full of social networking widgets and ads and self promotion, that doesn't even mention the closed captioning related keyboard shortcuts, which my cat discovered all by himself.
Does YouTube itself even document its own keyboard shortcuts online anywhere, let alone providing pop-up "?" help?
And does anybody really think that changing the transparency and background color of closed captioned text is so important that it deserved several dedicated undocumented keyboard shortcuts, no matter what the usability consequences were? Or that the user's inadvertent color and transparency preferences should be persisted across all videos instead of applied per-video? Who would even want partially transparent text anyway, let alone a key to change between several transparencies?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
Please assume the other side possibly doesn't know something you know (if that's really the case here), instead of being rude and accusing them of spreading falsehoods.
That is frustratingly poor contrast.
Here is what mine look like http://imgur.com/HLIVXQ6
You can click settings again to change font sizes, font family, colors, etc.
