(I’ve already posted this as a comment on youtube, but I’m putting it in the tags as well because I’d like as many people as possible to see it.)

As someone with an auditory processing disorder, I’d like to first thank
the people who are contributing to closed captioning on Jack’s channel,
as it helps me enjoy the content without having to focus Super Hard on
what’s being said. c:

But I would also like to address something I’ve seen happening a lot, even after many people pointed it out and Jack addressed it on his tumblr: the subtitles are not a place for you to add “funny” comments! They’re supposed to be a faithful transcript of the audio for people who can’t process or hear it properly. As such, they should be easily readable, and comments like “(are you okay Jack)” that are not actually part of the audio are often more confusing than funny to me. The example I just gave is kind of obviously someone’s comment (the obviousness heavily depends on context), but I’ve often had to rewind because something seemed off, only to realise that what I thought was being said was actually someone’s comment on the video.

To help you make the subtitles more readable, I’d advise you to think of how dialogue would be written in a book: no smileys, no “author’s notes” on what people are saying or doing, proper capitalisation and punctuation… Describing in the subtitles what can be seen on-screen (as opposed to noises like barking, giggling, beeps, music, etc. which are generally described between brackets in professional CC) is also not necessary, unless the action happens in the middle of a sentence (because in that case, it helps the viewers situate what’s being said in relation to what they can see happening – YMMV on this, it’s a fine balance between what should absolutely be specified and what doesn’t need to be).

That being said: thank you for contributing to closed captioning! As I said, it helps me (and many other people) a lot. Just, please please think of all of us who actually need the subtitles to understand what’s happening, before you add something that would only enhance the experience for people who don’t need captioning.