In hundreds of videos, tweets, messages, and handwritten letters, Poynter has urged creators to write their own captions or employ professionals to help get the job done right. She’s hardly a techno-skeptic: Like many people who identify as deaf or Deaf (deaf describes a medical condition; Deaf denotes a cultural identity), she has embraced social media to connect with others in her community. But #NoMoreCRAPtions highlights how impressive advances in assistive technologies such as automatic captioning can obscure these technologies’ imperfections. The campaign is Poynter’s way of pushing back against any misguided notion that deaf people live in a technological future that hasn’t yet arrived for everyone else.

Read: The sorry state of closed captioning

For television broadcasts, the Federal Communications Commission oversees captioning, a legal requirement under the Americans With Disabilities Act; the same legislation requires movie theaters to make closed captioning available for most films. YouTube, however, doesn’t fall under FCC jurisdiction, and has so far eluded regulation under the ADA. While film and television employ fleets of human stenocaptioners and voice writers to ensure that captions meet the required standards, YouTube’s automatic captions (visible when viewers click a button at the bottom of a video) are created by speech-recognition software. Trained on a vast database of language gleaned from the web, the software uses probability to guide its selection of words and phrases: If the two previous words were daily exercise, the next word is more likely to be routine than orphan.

Poynter insists that proper captions should not only fit the right words to a video’s audio content—a feat that automation struggles to achieve—but also use correct grammar and punctuation, describe sounds like the eerie creak of a door or the crackle of gunfire, and differentiate between speakers so deaf audiences know who’s talking. Although the term craptions predates Poynter’s campaign, her efforts have struck a chord, drawing international media attention and setting off waves of advocacy by hearing YouTube stars. After watching one of her videos in 2015, the LGBTQ-rights activist Tyler Oakley posted a video for his 6 million subscribers explaining how to add captions and why they matter. Recently, deaf fans rejoiced when, in a Facebook comment, the British radio personality Phil Lester announced his commitment to better captioning.

“Until Rikki had reached out, captioning my videos had not crossed my mind, as I know that YouTube auto-captions all videos,” Emma Lock, also known as Emzotic, a British former zookeeper whose channel features tips on caring for giant snails and bearded dragons, told me over email.

Even with the wave of good will, though, it’s hard to tell who has truly committed to Poynter’s message. She says that many creators caption for a while before quietly letting it slide. (A representative for Oakley told me that since 2017, all his videos have been manually captioned by a paid transcription service. Lester did not respond to a request for comment.) YouTubers sometimes balk at the time and money it takes to create their own captions or to hire others to do so. Some creators make a healthy living from their videos, but most struggle to churn out content and attract sponsors, often while working other jobs.