This month the Google/YouTube team announced the preliminary roll-out of an automatic captioning feature in YouTube, an innovation that uses speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions. This feature will make YouTube more accessible to people who are deaf or have hearing impairments, but will also have a broader impact. YouTube captions can also be automatically translated, making video more accessible across languages.
YouTube has had the ability to manually caption videos for a while, but this new feature automatically captions and times the transcripts. Note that only 13 YouTube channels will feature this automated captioning at this time, but all video owners will be able to upload transcripts and automatically time them.
Another web accessible feature that will allow more accessibility for those with visual impairments is the “Easy YouTube” interface. On the site, you can search for a video or enter the URL of a specific YouTube video and it will offer three video sizes to choose from.
Together, these two new features will remove many of the previous barriers and open YouTube up to many more users.
To learn more about how the new YouTube works, go to the Official Google Blog web page.
November 25th, 2009 at 8:56 am
While I applaud what Google is trying to do I worry that many people will now say; “see captions are now available” and the application of human transcription will dwindle. If you check out any of these auto-captioned things you’ll quickly see what a mess they truly are. Over time this will improve, but in the meantime the problem of captioning audio content for those who are Deaf or hard of hearing will continue.
November 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
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