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YouTube is at it again, causing problems for people, by removing displayed lyrics for people using free accounts, causing an issue for anyone who was relying on them. It's an attempt to force those people to pay for something they relied on, making them targets just for having a disability that is helped by having lyrics.
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What Exactly Happened?
Early in February of this year, YouTube pushed out a change they had been testing out. That change was to put lyrics behind a payway after the first 5. It meant that people with free accounts who relied on those lyrics, were suddenly forced to pay. These lyrics had been available to all, regardless of their YouTube Music plan, for years, so the sudden removal was a shock to many.
This isn't the first time that YouTube has made a decision that created a poor situation for people with disabilities. Several years ago I wrote about YouTube removing Community Captions on videos, which created a terrible situation for many people.
Is This An Accessibility Issue?
Your first thought might be that this wouldn't pose an accessibility issue. You might assume that the lyrics are only useful to people who can't hear, and why would they be using a music app in the first place? What use have they for lyrics that they could just look up elsewhere online?
This is one of those times where we need to recheck our assumptions about disabilities, as what we assume isn't always perfectly aligned with reality.
Assumptions
A typical assumption is that deaf people don't listen to music. This is wrong for a couple of reasons:
- Hearing isn't an on or off switch, and for many, it's a sliding scale, much like it can be for vision. Some people struggle with hearing things that are too quiet, others have trouble with sounds that are in the wrong pitch/frequency. It's actually a well known issue that as we age we lose the ability to hear noises in higher frequency ranges, and this can get worse over time.
- People who are completely deaf can still enjoy music, especially the kind with heavy bass that can literally be felt through the body.
The fact that many music performances and festivals have people signing the lyrics is proof enough that deaf people absolutely enjoy music.
It's also not only deaf people that benefit from lyrics, which is another typical assumption. People who have a native language different from that of a song may also struggle to keep up with just hearing some audio. Being able to see what's being sung can make the difference between understanding a song fully and just enjoying the sound of it.
Is This Discrimination?
While it's very likely that YouTube didn't intend to single out deaf people, they have inadvertantly created a situation in which people with hearing issues have been forced to pay for something that they need, something that hearing people do not need and therefore don't have to pay for.
In their attempt to find a new revenue stream, Google have created a situation which is absolutely singling out some people just because they have a disability, so it will be interesting to see what happens as the EAA (European Accessibility Act) begins to become enforced even more. Is it likely that Google will be fined because of this, perhaps not. But I do think that if a complaint were to go through it would either make Google add these back in, or be more open about why they decided to lock a feature behind a paywall that had been available for years.
Perhaps, they might even roll back the change of their own volition (insofar as the recent backlash would be that). Spotify tried the same thing a couple of years ago, and reversed their decision in the space of a few months, because the backlash was great enough.
Is the discrimination a crime? This is difficult to say, as the EAA would generally be hesitant to call it that. It would need to be an intentional violation (difficult to prove) and applied within a specific set of EU countries.
What Can We Do?
I think options are limited in an age where most music is locked behind a couple of large services. There will always be music offered on one platform but not another.
If you are within the EU and this change from YouTube does affect you, I think you're in a good position to raise an EAA concern to Google. They have a small amount of time to reply to you (typically 30 days) which should outline their approach to address the issue. If they fail to respond, then you need to contact the corresponding authority in the country you reside, submitting your evidence of how this change has created harm for you. There is no guarantee here, but it's the proper approach.
Regardless of ability, everyone can choose to move to a platform that continues to offer lyrics. As I said before though, it's not always as simple as that, as not every platform has all the music. But, companies do often respond to people voting with their wallets.
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