Captioning

August 5, 2010, Washington, D.C.:-- COAT celebrates the passage of the "Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010" (S. 3304)
by the U.S. Senate today by unanimous consent. Due to the extraordinary efforts of advocates across the country and in Washington, D.C., COAT has secured
a monumental step forward in accessible technology.

You’ve uploaded an awesome video to YouTube. You found a very good opportunity to talk about it in a conference, and you are happy because most of the people like it too. But you notice a particular group who couldn’t quite agree with you.

You find out that the group consisted of persons who are deaf and hard of hearing. Thinking for a few minutes, you realized that although deaf people could see the video, they can’t hear the audio, which incidentally plays a major part in the video’s excellence.

What are you going to do then? Well, if you truly value your efforts and would like everyone to enjoy what you did, you would provide captions for your video.

Captions in your YouTube video are very helpful to your viewers. This feature enables persons with hearing impairments to understand the spoken parts of your video. Captions also help hearing people who prefer reading content instead of listening to it, and those who wish to learn a new language.

Here are the steps in captioning your videos in YouTube. You may be surprised that this seemingly complex task only involves common web browsing procedures, not to mention it would also greatly enhance the accessibility of your video content.

In Benefits of Audio Transcription to Accessibility, I told you about the advantages of providing text transcripts of your site’s audio content. Now, let us take a look at when you should actually create text transcripts for your audio files. This also applies to video content in your site.

All YouTube videos can now carry captions created by speech recognition software in a move that the Google-owned video sharing site said would improve the
videos' accessibility.

The move has been welcomed by groups representing deaf and hard-of-hearing users as an important step in ensuring that non-textual online content is accessible
to people with hearing problems.

Google, Inc. has raised its offer to On2 Technologies in hopes to close the deal on a merger with the video compression technology company. This could mean
big things for On2 shareholders, as well as savvy small businesses. SEO Consultant, Eric McGehearty, is now encouraging clients to include properly formatted
videos into their websites because of the impact this merger will have on video search results.

On the computer screen, young David sways drunkenly, his one remaining front tooth poking his bottom lip as he talks. "I feel funny," he moans. "Is this
real life?"

The YouTube video of a disoriented child feeling the drugs from his dental surgery got a lot of attention earlier this year, but plenty of people didn't get the joke - captions for David's existential ramblings were not available to deaf and hearing-impaired users.

That's about to change, and it's a development that goes beyond access to videos of drugged children, Kanye West behaving badly, or pirated episodes of Top Model. Google
announced yesterday that it will incorporate automatic, machine-generated captions into all English-language YouTube videos. Although captions have been available on the site since 2006, they had to be provided by the video's owner. Now voice recognition technology can insert captions.

YouTube is introducing
machine-generated automatic captioning to YouTube
. The captions can also be translated. This obviously has incredible implications for the hearing-impaired and language translation. But it also has great implications for search.

Automatic captions will be generated using Google's automated speech recognition (ASR) technology and the same voice recognition algorithms used in Google Voice.

Up until recently, I thought that "let's watch a movie" could be an easy-to-implement, innocent idea. It still is, if the group you suggest it to can hear, can see, climb the steps and does not have a dietary restriction. But what happens, if certain members of a group lack all of the above, and you want to make sure that all are invited, all can enjoy it, and all have a good time. Now, this requires some planning.