There’s some GREAT news in the captioning world this week from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to collaborate with NCAM to establish and manage a new International Captioning Forum to set standards for captioning on any kind of video presented on the Web. This critical mass of industry leaders provides real hope that captioning on the Web will one day be as common as closed-captioning on TV, which is now required in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission. It follows other recent positive developments, including Apple making its Quicktime video player caption-friendly, and NBC making a bold decision to invest in captioning for all its prime-time shows that are streamed over the web. It’s yet another breakthrough move by NCAM and WGBH, which have led the way in not only advocating for accessible media in all forms — whether it be captioning on TV or in the movies, or audio description technology for blind moviegoers, or the booming video-on-the Web medium — but also in actually making it happen.
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One response to “AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! Collaborate On Web Video Captioning”
Thanks for the information and advocacy your blog provides. I recently sent the following e-mail to Sony Pictures Classics at [email protected]. (Not sure if that’s the best address.)
To whom it may concern,
I’m a film lover who also happens to be hearing impaired. I usually have to wait until films in English come out on DVD, so I can watch them with English subtitles. The Sony Classics recent releases that I have tried to enjoy, such as Rachel Getting Married, The Wackness, Frozen River, and Synecdoche, NY have “English subtitles” as an option on their menus. Instead of the film’s dailogue, however, they are embedded with the text of the director’s commentary. This is a new development, and it renders the movies inaccessible to many hearing impaired people.
In most cases, proper subtitle options in another language are offered. Watching The Wackness with Spanish subtitiles was not dope, so please consider the needs of hearing impaired film viewers when you format DVDs.
Sincerely,
Kristin Noël Schoenleber-Fontán