YouTube Makes Videos Accessible
04 March 2010
Google announced last week that YouTube now offers captioning for its videos. Captioning can be turned on by the user or requested by the creator of the video. The function also allows for translation of English captioning into fifty different languages.
In fact, it was Ken Harrenstien, a lead engineer at Google who also is a deaf person, who pushed for the service. The new feature certainly benefits the deaf and hearing impaired. It also allows non-English-speaking people around the world to understand the content of YouTube’s videos, and allows the caption texts to be accessed by Google’s search functions, a very powerful new search capability.
Pincent Mason’s Struan Robertson said at Out-Law.com that:
“The Disability Discrimination Act generally expects businesses that put videos online to make them accessible to people with hearing impairments. The time, cost and hassle of doing that has caused the duty to be neglected…I suspect Google’s captioning functionality will make YouTube a more attractive platform for online video for organisations that want to fulfil their accessibility duties without significant cost. The answer is not just to upload your videos to YouTube, though. It’s also about checking that the automated captions reflect the content accurately and fixing them when they don’t.”
Emma Harrison, Royal National Institute for Deaf people’s (RNID) director of external affairs, said in response to the announcement:
“RNID welcomes Google taking this first step towards making YouTube more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Captioning will significantly help people with a hearing loss understand video content and increase their ability to share experiences of watching those in which speech plays a prominent part. We believe that all on-demand content should be accessible and RNID will continue lobbying hard to ensure that people with a hearing loss have better opportunities to enjoy subtitled videos, movies and television programmes.”
Many internet bloggers have already posted some funny and interesting misinterpretations that have occurred when users requested captions for a video for which the captioning had not been reviewed by its originator. It is important to realize that speech recognition software is an imperfect operation. But when a video creator requests the service and has the opportunity to correct such misinterpretations by the software, excellent captioning is quite achievable.
Google has been adding captioning to videos already in its system and encourages all video posters to request captioning and review and perfect it as soon as possible after posting their videos. In a statement released last week, Google said that twenty hours of video are currently being uploaded to the site each minute, and that it hopes this new feature will help democratise its content and foster greater collaboration and understanding.
