Turn off YouTube voiceover

“A royal blue background fills the screen with white words at its center: Sony Digital Classics. Close blurry glimpses of white letters resolve into words on a black background: Topic Studios.”

And we who rented the movie would spend half an hour or so trying to figure out how to turn off the voice that was telling us what we were seeing on our TV screen.

That was the unexpected start to our viewing of Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022), rented via YouTube. Was it a Roku problem? No. A problem with the YouTube settings? So it would seem, but the YouTube settings have nothing about accessibility or audio. The problem lay in the settings that were in place — how? why? — for this movie.

The solution: press the up arrow on the remote twice and move to the right — Channel, Captions, Like, Dislike, Save, Settings. In Settings, choose Audio tracks and change “English descriptive” to “English original.” Then watch the movie in peace.

[I recommend Turn Every Page with considerable enthusiasm.]