Rikki Poynter

Rikki Poynter (born July 16, 1991 ) is a deaf YouTuber and activist. She began as a beauty vlogger and is now a lifestyle vlogger with a focus on deaf awareness, accessibility, and the importance of closed captioning. She describes her deafness as severe in her right ear and moderate to severe in her left ear. She was raised orally under a German deaf mother and an American hearing father in a mainstream environment and attended mainstream schools from K-12, which she described as difficult due to a lack of accommodation. In her early 20s, Poynter became more involved in the Deaf community and began to learn American Sign Language (ASL) in 2015. She continued creating beauty videos for the next four years, but then decided to use her platform to spread awareness on Deaf issues because she wanted to create content that was beneficial and meaningful. She rebranded her YouTube channel, which now covers a variety of topics relating to Deaf culture, Deaf issues, closed captioning, and other lifestyle topics. In her videos, Poynter shares her own personal stories about being Deaf. Her videos are described as using humor and snark to highlight challenges facing the deaf/Deaf/Hard of Hearing (d/Deaf/HoH) community and to debunk misconceptions.

Her YouTube channel currently has over 91,500 subscribers and a combined video view count of over 6.8 million across 608 videos. Her most popular video, "Sh*t Hearing People Say (Things You Don't Say to Deaf & Hard of Hearing)" has over 500,000 views.

Through YouTube and social media, Poynter has been able to find a supportive community that has also helped push for Deaf rights and better closed captioning on YouTube. Because of this, Poynter encourages YouTube creators to manually enter their own closed captions.

In 2014, Poynter began making videos about this issue and advocating it on her social media platforms. Her goals are to teach YouTubers about the importance of closed captions and to increase the number of creators that caption their content.

In September 2016, Poynter launched the #NoMoreCraptions campaign to fight against poor closed captioning, including ones that are positioned incorrectly, that lack proper grammar and punctuation, and that include unnecessary comments and/or jokes. Other articles posted to the site include history and facts to educate those that are unfamiliar with the background of deafness. At Buffer Festival, she was part of the Science and Education panel in 2015, and the Women on YouTube panel in 2016. In 2015, Poynter also gave a talk at Lycoming College about accessibility and deaf issues such as captioning, sign language access and police brutality.

Other involvement Poynter formerly wrote articles for DTV News, a news channel with accessible content for the d/Deaf/HoH community.

Poynter also actively supports movements such as #DeafTalent, which aims to acknowledge Deaf individuals working in the media industry and stop the trend of casting hearing actors in Deaf roles.

She also contributes video content to Ai-Media, a service that provides access to the world's content through live captioning, closed captions, transcripts and audio description.