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doesn't show any links to official YouTube documentation on the first page of results -- the top featured hit is an outdated page from an "SEO Consultant" full of social networking widgets and ads and self promotion, that doesn't even mention the closed captioning related keyboard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?

[1] http://imgur.com/a/33Mrt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...